Twitter’s service was disrupted early Monday evening for some users, just as Sony took the stage to show off new products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The outage is noteworthy given its timing, coming after the massive cyberattack on Sony Pictures. Twitter would serve as a vital tool for Sony and reporters there to disseminate the news, though the outage likely crippled some of their efforts.
“We are currently experiencing an issue with tweeting and a delay in timelines,” Twitter said in a post of its own. “Our engineers are currently working on this issue.” The company did not respond to comment further.
It’s unclear exactly how many people were affected by the outage. Downdetector.com, which analyzes service disruptions for various sites, tallied more than 1,700 outage reports around the time of this post, originating from areas as diverse as Los Angeles, New York, St. Louis and Chicago in the U.S.
For many users, new tweets from the people they follow stopped appearing in their streams. The same problem appeared to be affecting TweetDeck.
“Can only see my tweets. Not updating my timeline,” one user wrote on Downdetector’s site.
Isitdownrightnow.com, a similar site, said Twitter was up and reachable, but was showing a dramatically slower response time.
One reporter at CES said that some people there still had access to Twitter.
Sony’s press conference was still successfully livestreamed on Ustream’s site.