Millions of Twitter users were blocked from their feeds on Tuesday as the social networking site went down in several countries, suffering one of the worst outages in its 10-year history.
A spokesperson for Twitter Europe confirmed the outage, while users in South Africa, Brazil, the Philippines, Nigeria and Uganda also reported problems accessing the site with the hashtag #twitterdown on Facebook.
Twitter has become essential in South Africa – it is almost as important as electricity.
Especially for the Twitterrati, who through the use of hashtags, make topics become of national importance and even trivial information trend.
In the early days of the site, users were often met by the “fail whale” — a drawing that meant the site was broken. But it has become much more reliable in recent years, seldom going offline and not crashing for longer than 30 minutes.