For some users, Twitter appears to have crashed.
Instead, they were forced to look at a photo of a dog sitting on a chair and were told “there’s nothing to see here”.
The site provides a clickable link, which suggests that it might be a solution to the problem. But it just seems to take the user back to the home page – and show them the same poodle again.
Dogs appearing for affected users
(Twitter)
The Twitter dog appears to be a new addition: Usually, the site displays a more standard error page. It has long been known for another animal, the “failed whale,” which emerged when the site was hit by the usual outages that affected its early years.
Amazon also shows users dogs on its error page when the shopping site is not functioning properly.
The issue appears to be limited to Safari users trying to access the site on the desktop.
Other browsers and Safari on iPhone seem to work fine. Other ways of accessing Twitter, such as Tweetdeck, also seem to work as expected.
Twitter’s API status page categorizes technical issues supporting the site, but no issues were reported.
However, the outage tracking site Down Detector did show some problems. While they didn’t reach the scale of a widespread outage, it showed that a large number of users were affected by this strange bug.