Twitter down: site crashes, with pictures still failing to load

Visitors to the site were greeted by images that wouldn’t load, if they could get on at all

A photo taken on September 11, 2013 shows the logo of social networking website 'Twitter' is displayed on a computer screen in London (Getty Images)

The Twitter website and apps broke tonight, and even as service was restored pictures failed to load properly on the site.

While Twitter’s status site did not make mention of any issues, many on the site reported being unable to properly log on or to send tweets.

The problem seemed to hit Tweetdeck and other clients, as well as the main Twitter.com site. Both the avatars that accompany users tweets and pictures posted into timelines did not seem to be working.

The site appeared to have broken entirely for a short period at around 5.40pm in the UK, but soon after came back to life. But pictures were still broken as this article was posted, with images on the site either slow to load or not seeing images at all.

While Twitter was once well known for crashing — and the “fail whale” image that was shown became a familiar site to many early users — the site has become much more reliable in recent years. Twitter’s status page does not report any major problems since February 10, when some users were unable to tweet and were locked out of using the site.