Twitter glitch logs out Indian users

Micro-blogging website faces bug in front end code; millions of users affected

A technical glitch caused most Indian users of micro-blogging website Twitter to get auto-logged out on their devices early Monday morning. While users of Twitter on Android operating system (OS) were most affected, several users of other platforms like iOS and Windows, also experienced the issue.

“Between 4:00 and 9:25 PST (5:30 am – 10:50 am IST) today, some users were unable to sign in to Twitter. This issue was due to a bug in our front end code, which has been patched,” Twitter said in a statement. “We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this.”

Twitter has around 33 million active users in India.

The issue has not yet been completely resolved as several users continue to face trouble in signing back onto the website. Twitter said its engineers are currently working to resolve the glitch.

According to sources, the glitch affected some other parts of the world besides India. However, it could not be confirmed which other countries were affected.

“I woke up this morning to see a notification on my mobile phone that I had been signed out of Twitter. I generally never do this, so I was a little confused,” said Punit Rastogi, an IT professional and avid user of Twitter. “After repeated trials, it was almost four hours later that I was able to log back. Now, I see that everyone on Twitter is complaining about the outage. This has never happened before.”

A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that such a widespread outage had never been experienced by Twitter before and this was a one-off event. Twitter had experienced a service issue earlier this month, when users complained of not being able to post updates on the website.