If you’ve tried to access Twitter in any capacity recently you will have been met with multiple errors and problems as the site and its subsidiaries seem to be down right now.

Downdetector, a third party tool which tracks the availability of websites online, reports that Twitter is definitely unresponsive right now with almost a thousand reports of problems since 14:00 SAST.

Trying to access Twitter.com on a desktop right now will kick you back to the log in screen for the service where logins will fail. The app is similarly unusable with with the error “Cannot retrieve tweets at this time. Please try again later.” The app at least will still display tweets you have already loaded into your timeline so those remain viewable for now.

Even third party sites which access Twitter like TweetDeck seem to be offline. Trying to visit TweetDeck right now won’t even display an error message or some problem page, just a strong of confused HTML.

As for why this is all happening details are very thin on the ground but we can report that it is a worldwide problem with places like The United States and Pakistan also affected along with us in South Africa.

For now all we can do is wait for more details to be revealed. As Twitter usually makes all its announcements on its own site we may not get an explanation of what us happening until the problem is resolved.