Twitter users were unable to access the social-media platform for about an hour and those trying to access the platform on mobile devices and desktop were met with blank feeds, logged out and told to “try again later”. It was one of Twitter’s the longest outages since breaking down for more than two hours in 2016. Outage monitor Downdetector began receiving user reports of problems with the app and website at 12:45 BST. By 13:12, it had received almost 30,000. What can really cause a social media platform to break down ?

