TWITTER stopped working for users all around the world in a surprise outage today.

The website went offline at around 2.50pm UK time, then came back online at 2.58pm, then went back offline at 3.01pm – and came back up at around 3.35pm.

3 Twitter stopped working unexpectedly on Monday afternoon Credit: The Sun / Twitter

Service seemed to be restored just before 3pm, but then the website went back offline immediately. It came back online around 35 minutes later.

It's not yet clear exactly what went wrong.

Users trying to get on the website were met with an error message: "Something is technically wrong.

"Thanks for noticing—we're going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon."

3 Twitter outage hotspots appeared at locations all around the world on Monday afternoon Credit: The Sun / Down Detector

The Down Detector website – which tracks services when they go offline – revealed that more than 5,000 people complained about the outage.

But it's very likely many more (and potentially all) users were affected.

One distraught user wrote: "TWITTER IS DOWN... THIS IS THE END OF THE WORLD"

Another said: "Was panicking I'd lost my account. Phew. Not just me."

Twitter confirmed the outage in a tweet from its official Twitter Support account once the website was back online.

The company wrote: "Some users may have experienced problems sending and viewing tweets earlier today.

"This issue is now resolved."

Some users may have experienced problems sending and viewing Tweets earlier today. This issue is now resolved. — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) April 17, 2018

3 Down Detector reported a sudden spike in complaints about Twitter's service just before 3pm UK time Credit: The Sun / Down Detector

Data on the outage suggests a range of different devices were affected, including the Android app, the desktop website, and the Apple iPad app.

The Sun can confirm that the iOS iPhone app was also broken during the outage.

Confusingly however, Twitter's official Tweetdeck website was still working, making it possible for users to read and post tweets – even though the official website wasn't working.

Twitter down – but why? Here are some of the top reasons websites go offline... Hardware failures – servers that host websites can go wrong, and that can take a website offline

– servers that host websites can go wrong, and that can take a website offline DNS issues – the DNS is the system that directs your computer to a website, so problems with the DNS can make websites appear as if they're not working

– the DNS is the system that directs your computer to a website, so problems with the DNS can make websites appear as if they're not working DDoS attack – hackers can flood a website's servers with fake 'pings', overloading them and causing them to crash

– hackers can flood a website's servers with fake 'pings', overloading them and causing them to crash Hack attack – hackers could also get access to a website's systems and take it offline through a host of different methods

– hackers could also get access to a website's systems and take it offline through a host of different methods Scheduled maintenance – sometimes websites have to go offline for big changes to be made

– sometimes websites have to go offline for big changes to be made Emergency maintence – if a very important change needs to be made quickly, users might not always be warned in advance of downtime

Twitter regularly has issues with its service, although this appears to be one of the more severe instances of a Twitter failure.

According to Down Detector, the most recent Twitter service blunder was on April 12 (prior to today's mishap), prompting just under 600 complaints from users.

Twitter is one of the world's largest social networks, serving around 330million users every single month.

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In 2016, it's believed that around 6,000 tweets were sent every second on Twitter.

That works out at around 350,000 tweets per minute, 500million per day – and 200billion per year.

We've asked Twitter for comment on what went wrong, but the social network declined to provide any additional info.

Were you affected by the Twitter outage? How did you cope during the 35 minutes of downtime? Let us know in the comments!

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