Twitter For Android Suffers Brief Outage: Here’s Why

Today when people across the world tried to access to micro-blogging site Twitter they encountered some strange problems. The Twitter for Android app was logging out users automatically and it did not allow them to log back in. The most popular Twitter client, TweetDeck was listing every new tweet that was being sent out to be a year old and Twitter’s mobile website suddenly suffered downtime. People immediately took to the web version of the service to report their displeasure and the company soon acknowledged this issue #-Link-Snipped-# on their official account. The engineers at Twitter took about three hours to sort out this problem and #-Link-Snipped-# that they had sorted most of it out and some other minor issues will be solved soon. So what exactly went wrong for Twitter today? It turns out that while many Twitter users were busy ranting, a few of them were investigating this issue.


What Went Wrong With Twitter Today?

If two Twitter users are to be believed it had something to do with date and time. A user on Twitter who goes by the name #-Link-Snipped-# performed a man-in-the-middle hack on the Twitter for Android login and found out that Twitter’s servers think the date is 29 December 2015, a complete year ahead of today’s date. That perfectly explained why TweetDeck was listing fresh tweets to be a year ago. Another user Twitter for Android appears to have just experienced a massive outage. Wide reports of users being logged out, unable to log back in. : Android, enquired the HTTP response header of the Twitter desktop website and found the same problem. Since the date according to Twitter’s side was a year later, it was rejecting log-ins and logging out its Android app users. You may know that it is a norm for various websites to automatically logout your accounts if you haven’t been using it on a particular system for a long time. A peculiar thing we find about this whole episode is that no explanation has been given as to why iOS users never suffered any outage. Twitter #-Link-Snipped-# the issue was due to a bug in their front end code that was patched immediately. It also states that some users are still experiencing log-in issues which will be soon resolved by its engineers.

Source: Twitter error kicks Android app users out of their accounts - The Verge