Tweeters left twiddling their thumbs after social media platform crashed

Millions of avid tweeters were left #twiddlingtheirthumbs yesterday when Twitter suddenly went down for a number of hours.

Users of the social media platform began reporting blackouts at around 8.30am, with Twitter timelines then sporadically reappearing for some users on mobile apps just before 11am.

Over the following hours, however, the site regularly dropped back offline, with images and videos failing to load at all for many during this time.