Is Twitter Down? Users Around The World Report Issues

UPDATE, 8 p.m. EST: Twitter appeared to be back online again Tuesday evening. Issues that prevented users from accessing the site earlier in the evening were apparently resolved.

Original story:

Some users of Twitter, the microblogging site known for users' 140-character posts, reported Tuesday evening that they could not access the homepage, which redirected to a message reporting technical issues. "Something is technically wrong," the message said. "Thanks for noticing -- we're going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon."

The service DownDetector.com, which usually identifies social media sites facing technical issues, has not posted about any problems regarding Twitter. The site showed only a couple of dozen reported issues in the last few hours, with more than 60 percent coming from the website.

Twitter's status page also has not posted any updates. The last time the site posted on the status page about a service issue was Nov. 19. The outage lasted for 20 minutes.

In its infancy, Twitter used to experience more frequent outages, telling users the site was over capacity.

The main issues Tuesday evening seem to be coming from those trying to access the site's homepage, which features the newsfeed. Profiles on personal account pages are accessible on the site. It is unclear if users are having issues loading Twitter through apps on mobile devices.

It is not known how many of the site's 307 million active users were affected when the social network went down.

Many users were still able to post to Twitter to bemoan the site going offline.

Twitter made headlines earlier Tuesday for appointing a new head of diversity, Jeffrey Siminoff. The announcement was made on the social network site.

The site has received criticism in the past for the lack of diversity among its staff, and some disagreed with the move to hire Siminoff, who is white.

"Not saying a white guy can't be head of diversity but for a company that hires a majority white guys it sends the wrong message," wrote user Mark S. Luckie on Twitter.

This story is developing and will be updated as information becomes available.