Twitter services ‘down’ as several users face outage – Times of India

NEW DELHI: Twitter services were affected on Thursday with multiple users reporting issues while posting, searching and sharing content via the micro-blogging site. “Something went wrong. Try reloading,” a search on the social networking site showed.
“Profiles’ Tweets may not be loading for some of you on web and we’re currently working on a fix. Thanks for sticking with us!” Twitter stated.

According to outage monitoring website Downdetector, more than 6,000 user reports indicated issues with Twitter, about 93 per cent of those being related to its website.
The social media firm had faced a similar ‘brief’ outage in April this year.

Meanwhile, the government and Twitter have been at loggerheads for the last few months over various issues, including statements made by company officials about the freedom of speech in India.
The biggest flashpoint emerged when Twitter failed to fully comply with the new digital rules that came into force last month.
Twitter had earlier accused the government of “dangerous overreach” and claimed it was forced to “withhold” portions of “legitimate free speech”. The government had reacted strongly to these allegations, charging the company with deliberately subverting the law of the land and trying to “dictate” its terms.
New digital rules
The new IT rules for social media companies mandate large platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google to undertake greater due diligence and make these digital platforms more accountable and responsible for the content hosted by them.
The rules also require significant social media intermediaries — providing services primarily in the nature of messaging — to enable identification of the “first originator” of the information that undermines the sovereignty of India, the security of the state, or public order.
Under the rules, significant social media intermediaries — those with over 50 lakh users — are required to appoint a grievance officer, a nodal officer and a chief compliance officer. These personnel have to be residents in India.
Further, social media companies will have to take down flagged content within 36 hours, and remove within 24 hours content that is flagged for issues such as nudity and pornography.
Also, Twitter’s interim resident grievance officer for India, who was hired in June under the new rules, resigned within a month of his appointment.
(With inputs from agencies)