Twitter goes down during co-founder's SXSW panel

Oh, the irony! Audience members couldn't #askbiz their questions as the mobile app went down

Published March 11, 2014 5:20PM (EDT)

Twitter is back up, but its mysterious outage happened at the most inopportune time: during Twitter co-creator and co-founder Christopher “Biz” Stone’s SXSW panel. Stone was talking about Twitter’s amazing organizing power, and attendees were encouraged to tweet questions to Stone using the hashtag #askbiz.

Of course, with Twitter down this complicated things. According to Pando Daily, a presenter kept repeating, “In just a second we’ll get to questions from the audience.”

As far as we know, an Ellen selfie is not responsible for the outage. Twitter released a short (under 140 characters) status update. “Most users are experiencing issues accessing Twitter on web and mobile apps,” the update read. “We’re looking into it.” Meanwhile Pando Daily reports that questions for Biz Stone were taken from pre-outage tweets.

Some used #askbiz to voice their snark about the microblogging site being down:

[embedtweet id="443454835765952512"]

A Twitter engineer also joked about the outage:

[embedtweet id="443456152798392320"]

Eventually service was restored:

[embedtweet id="443458293646647296"]


By Sarah Gray

Sarah Gray is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on innovation. Follow @sarahhhgray or email sgray@salon.com.

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Biz Stone Innovation Outage Sxsw Technology Twitter