NEW YORK – Twitter Inc suffered a major outage on Wednesday, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the popular social media platform or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back online.
The incident is the platform’s first apparent widespread service disruption since billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter as chief executive in late October.
Downdetector – a website that tracks outages through a range of sources, including user reports – showed more than 10,000 affected users from the United States, about 2,500 from Japan, and about 2,500 from Britain at the peak of the disruption.
Most of the reports came from users stating that they faced technical issues accessing the social network via Web browsers.
The errors began at around 7pm Eastern time (8am Singapore time on Thursday). Reports of Twitter outages fell sharply by Wednesday evening, according to the website, with some users later commenting that service had returned to normal.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and its status page showed that all systems were operational.
Mr Musk tweeted later on Wednesday that “significant backend server architecture changes” had been rolled out and that “Twitter should feel faster”, but his post did not make any reference to the downtime reported by users.
The outage came days after Mr Musk said he had shut down one of Twitter’s data centres in Sacramento, California.
During the outage, some users said they were unable to log in to their Twitter account via desktops or laptops. A smaller number of users said the issue also affected the mobile app and features including notifications.
Others took to Twitter to share updates and memes about the service disruption, with #TwitterDown trending as a hashtag on the site.
Some attempts to log in to Twitter from desktops prompted an error message saying: “Something went wrong, but don’t fret – it’s not your fault. Let’s try again.”
Ms Isik Mater, director of research at Internet monitoring service NetBlocks, said: “The problems with Twitter exhibit in multiple countries and are widespread.”
Referring to the interface on which Twitter operates, she added: “The platform API is affected, which serves the mobile app, as well as many aspects of the desktop site.”
Mr Musk tweeted that he was still able to use the service.
“Works for me,” he posted, responding to a user who had asked if Twitter was broken.
The outage comes two months after Mr Musk completed his US$44 billion (S$59 billion) takeover of Twitter, which has been marked by chaos and controversy.
By some estimates, hundreds of Twitter employees quit the company in November, including engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing service outages.
Thousands of Twitter users were also hit by global outages in February and July, before Mr Musk’s takeover.
Other big technology companies have also been hit by outages in 2022. In July, a near 19-hour service outage at Canada’s biggest telecom operator Rogers Telecommunications shut banking, transport and government access for millions.
Mr Musk said in December that he will step down as CEO as soon as he finds a replacement, with the caveat that he would still lead the key software and servers teams.
A group of American senators have called for a Federal Trade Commission probe of the company under his leadership, and the deal faces a possible national security review by the US government.
Twitter is facing pressure in other jurisdictions. The company needs to increase the number of monitors in Europe, said the European Union’s internal market commissioner Thierry Breton in November.
REUTERS, NYTIMES, BLOOMBERG
