Speculation over Twitter's ability to grow and innovate

On Tuesday, Twitter experienced a widespread, five-hour outage that affected web, mobile and even Twitter's application programming interface. However, even once resolved, some users still struggled to access various services, leaving them disconnected from the site. While Twitter is the fourth-largest social media site will 350 million active users, and in spite of numerous recent updates, including expanding its 140-character limit, user counts have started to level off and growth has been slow for a social media of Twitter's standard. Speculation is that the reason for this is Twitter's failure to innovate. Since Jack Dorsey returned as CEO in October, the stock's price has fallen, hitting just over $17 last Thursday.

Twitter started the day on the wrong foot.

Many users noticed early on they were unable to access the service as the social network experienced a worldwide outage Tuesday morning. Anyone having flashbacks of the “fail whale”? The image above was once the familiar screen icon users would see when the site was inaccessible in its early days.

The worldwide outage started at 3:20 a.m. EST on Tuesday, January 19. Following the total outage, Twitter also experienced a number of access problems.

The problems were widespread affecting Web, mobile and even Twitter’s API (application programming interface). Users may have noticed the company’s error messages saying the network was both “overcapacity” and experiencing an “internal error.”

Two hours after the outage occurred, Twitter had worked out a lot of the kinks plaguing the site. Unfortunately, problems were still popping up sporadically for users. Some services were still unavailable making it so some users still couldn’t access Twitter.

Twitter’s developer-facing monitoring showed that 4 out of 5 of the company’s public APIs were experiencing “service disruption”.

Taking a look some hours later showed that most of these issues had been fixed, though one API was still having “performance issues.” This final API issue looks to have been fixed around five hours after the initial outages occurred.

Twitter has not yet revealed the cause of the problems. The company tweeted from its support account, simply acknowledging the problem and that it was working toward a solution.

Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution. — Twitter Support (@Support) January 19, 2016