WOMEN across the world experienced a 50-minute gap in online abuse last night after Twitter was hit by technical problems.

The microblogging site’s outage hit shortly after 11pm and was immediately noticed by panicked users who had not been called feminazis for up to 120 seconds.

Susan Traherne of Leeds, who recently made the mistake of defending the Equal Pay Act in a 2013 blog post, said: “I knew something was wrong when my phone stopped buzzing.

“When I looked at my mentions there were no anime avatars, no libertarians, no proud vaping atheists and worst of all not a single egg.

“Nobody was telling me to make them a sandwich. Nobody was telling me to get a sense of humour, grow a pair or simply fuck off.

“I didn’t know who I was any more. Thank God they got it back on before midnight, or my self-esteem might have recovered.”

A Twitter spokesman said: “Unfortunately our network occasionally collapses under the sheer weight of misogynistic vitriol.

“We try to encourage users to go outside and abuse women in real life, but apparently they’re too fearful to speak in their actual presence.”