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#EndSARS: Nigerians Express Fears As #TwitterDown For Hours

Apprehension gripped online and offline protesters against police brutality and extrajudicial killings on Thursday night as Twitter shut down for over two hours.

The social media platform used by hundreds of millions worldwide is one of the major information-sharing platforms used for the #EndSARS campaign.

In fact, Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, has been consistent in his support for the #EndSARS protests by sharing links on how to make donations to the campaign.

According to downdetector.com, users on every continent had reported being unable to use the platform, but the outages were concentrated on the east and west coasts of the United States, as well as Japan and some African countries including Nigeria.

The outage appeared to have started around 09:30pm before it was restored around past 12am on Friday.

“We are continuing to monitor the issue, and things appear to have returned to normal,” Twitter’s application programming interface site said on Friday.

The California-based company had tweeted earlier, “We had some trouble with our internal systems and don’t have any evidence of a security breach or hack.”

Leading voices against the criminal acts of some of the operatives of the now-disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad of the Nigeria Police Force have, however, expressed concerns over the technical breakdown of the social media application.

Actress Kate Henshaw tweeted, “Twitter oooo!!!! What happun???? You people crashed a whole app! I fear who no fear una. #EndSARS #EndPoliceBrutalityNigeria.

Also, comedian, @mrmacaronii, tweeted, “Twitter crashed and some people started sending me DMs and mentions on Instagram. So una dey the app?? Some people even find me go Facebook. ‘Baami! Won ti pa Twitter oooo. Kini way forward bayi’ #EndSARS.”

A Facebook user, Ada Bekee, also wrote, “Have they shut down Twitter? I have been trying to refresh to no avail.”

Punch