Twitter has been experiencing technical difficulties for over two hours now, and the social media network has shut down its service in the third outage in the past couple of days. While the previous two occasions on Friday and Monday were short-lived (about 10 minutes each), today the website has been displaying a technical difficulties message for over two hours.
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A number of services related to the trading industry rely on Twitter feeds to function properly. Not only the brokers that are looking for ways to keep in touch with their clients and provide them with Analytics , but also market sentiment analysis tools that are heavily relying on information gathered from social media.
With the disruption in the service still ongoing, companies have the rare opportunity to ascertain for themselves how much of their traffic really does come from Twitter. The social network has been considering some changes lately, namely the removal of the 140 character limit.
The CEO of the company Jack Dorsey hinted on the matter in a social media message earlier in January. The technical difficulties which the company is experiencing could actually be a result of a planned 70 fold expansion in the limit to 10,000 characters.
The company has provided a statement on its website about the current status of the network. The message reads: “Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution.”
Twitter services were interrupted globally yesterday between 06:23 AM and 06:33 AM PST. Last Friday the social network platform was inaccessible for about 17 minutes after 12:35 PM PST.
For brokers, the outage is unlikely to have hit their operations substantially, as they have the option to use alternative social media channels in order to keep their users informed. A more worrying issue for brokers is how will Market Makers tackle the prospective big price gap in the shares of Twitter, once the markets start operating.
