Twitter Sign-In Issue Resolved After Widespread Outage On Desktop And Mobile Platforms

Twitter announced late on Sunday that an issue, which prevented many users from signing into the social networking site from desktop computers as well as through third-party mobile applications, has been resolved.

The company had earlier confirmed on its official blog that engineers were working on fixing the problem, which stopped some users from accessing the microblogging site through online and mobile apps, including Twitter for Android, Echofon and Twitterific. The issue also caused tweets that were posted using Tweetdeck to be backdated by almost a year, TechCrunch reported.

“This issue was due to a bug in our front end code, which has been patched. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this,” Twitter said.

While Twitter has not said what exactly caused the outage, a Twitter user -- @AnonyPress -- posted a picture that suggested the company’s servers might have assumed the date to be Dec. 29, 2015, which likely caused the forced log-out for many users.

According to another Twitter account @TheAnonMovement, which appears to be related to the hackers group “Anonymous,” the issue was an internal server error and was not linked to any cyberattack.

Many Twitter users took to Reddit late on Sunday to complain about the sign-in issue, which reportedly did not affect users of Apple's iOS operating system.

“I'm sitting beside a Twitter employee... he was wondering why he was logged out of his Android account. He just logged in through his corporate laptop and it's working for him there. Twitter is aware people are being forcefully logged out,” a Reddit user wrote.