Problems launching a heavily revamped homepage are being blamed for a major glitch that hit the Twitter service on Tuesday evening.
Trouble started to become evident as the service rolled back features, starting with timelines and the new Twitter site under the banner "Twitter's going retro today." Some minutes later the company suspended another feature with the message "Sticking with our retro theme, we're temporarily disabling trends."
By no coincidence the company had just launched a new homepage based on "follow your interests," which the company then rolled back completely. The new design remains under wraps until later today at the earliest.
Twitter's new homepage.The new page promises to fix one of the service's gripes, which is that it can be difficult to find tweets on particular topics in a reliable way.
"When you search for a topic, you can now discover accounts that are relevant to that particular subject. (Previously, you would have seen accounts that have the specific term in their name or username.)," said a Twitter company blog, explaining the change.
In recent days, unconfirmed reports have claimed that Twitter company has reportedly had problems with a data center in Utah and has had to move capacity to California. That issue is likely unconnected to the latest service glitch.
Twitter has suffered downtime in the past but with each passing month and with users growing, sensitivity to problems rises. Users often use Twitter itself to warn of problems.