Twitter Inc experienced a significant outage Wednesday that left tens of thousands of people around the world unable to use key features or access their social media platform. Services were restored several hours later.
This is the first widespread disruption to Twitter’s service since Elon Musk, a billionaire, took control of Twitter in October.
A website called Downdetector monitors outages using a variety of sources, including user reports, which displayed more than 10,000 users affected from the United States and approximately 2,500 from Japan at the height of disruption.
The majority of reports were from users who reported technical difficulties accessing social networks via web browsers.
According to Twitter, reports of outages on Twitter fell dramatically by Wednesday night. Some users were able to comment later, and the service was back to normal.
Twitter didn’t immediately reply to my request for comment, but the status page of the social media network showed that all systems are operational.
Musk later tweeted that there had been “significant changes in the backend server architecture” and that Twitter should be “faster”. However, he did not mention any downtime that users reported.
Some users reported that they couldn’t log into their Twitter accounts via laptops or desktops during the outage. Users who reported the problem also had issues accessing the mobile app, including notification features and the application itself.
Many others took to Twitter for updates and memes about the disruption. #TwitterDown was a trending hashtag.
An error message was displayed when trying to log in to Twitter via a desktop computer. It said: “Something went wrong. But don’t worry, it’s not your fault. Let’s do it again.
Musk stated that he could still use the service.
Musk replied to the user asking if Twitter had been broken by writing, “Works for me”.
This outage occurs two months after Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. It was a turbulent period marked by controversy and chaos.
According to some estimates, hundreds of Twitter employees left the company in November. This includes engineers who fix bugs or prevent service interruptions.
Before Musk’s acquisition, thousands of Twitter users also experienced global outages between February and July.
This year, outages have affected other large technology companies. Rogers Telecommunications, Canada’s largest telecom company, experienced a service disruption lasting nearly 19 hours that shut down access to millions of people.
