Twitter and its services were down last night for nearly 40 minutes.

Users were unable to access the service on a native web browser or from apps from about 12.50 pm though third-party programs like TweetDeck were still running. From about 1 pm, the website started displaying an error screen which showed: “Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing — we’re going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon.”

People trying to acess Twitter via the mobile app also faced trouble as the feed wouldn’t update. Services were completely resumed around 1.35 pm but by then, Twitter’s page on Facebook had innumerable complains of the site being down.

There is speculation that the service went down due to LA Laker’s basketball player Kobe Bryant’s last game after going through a strong 20-season career in the NBA. he game started at 1 pm (local US time) — around the same time Twitter went caput. It may be all be a coincidence, of course but a fan page of the superstar player had earlier predicted that Bryant’s retirement would break Twitter three years ago.

Although, the impact of the outage is yet to be known, Australians and US citizens were affected by the outage. Currently, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is in Australia and had later said to a news outlet that the company had more work to do in helping the social network’s users stop the scourge of online abuse.