Twitter released a statement confirming that it was investigating the issue Other channels like Facebook and Instagram were working during the outage LONDON: Twitter was down on Thursday evening across the world, including in the Middle East, US and the UK, as users were unable to access the social media channel on web and mobile devices. The company released a statement saying it was investigating why users were unable to connect. After roughly an hour"s down time, the channel was back up and running. The company"s statement did not say how widespread the outage was, but the disruption appeared to be affecting both web and mobile app users. Outages were widespread in Twitter"s early years, so much so that a cartoon "fail whale" the company would put up during outages came to symbolize Twitter almost as much as its little blue bird icon. The whale was retired in 2013, largely because Twitter didn"t want to be associated with what it represented any more. After all, outages had become far less common. This time, Twitter"s home page reads in part, "Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing."