UNITED STATES: On Wednesday, Twitter Inc. experienced a significant outage that prevented tens of thousands of users from accessing or using the platform’s essential features for many hours before services appeared to resume.
The incident marks the social media platform’s first apparent substantial service disruption since billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter as CEO in late October.
According to Downdetector, a website that analyses outages based on a variety of sources, including user reports, there were over 10,000 affected clients from the US at the peak of the disruption, as well as about 2,500 people from Japan and around 2,500 from the UK.
The majority of the reports came from individuals who claimed they experienced issues accessing the social network through a web browser.
According to the website, reports of Twitter outages had significantly decreased by Wednesday night. Subsequently, several users noted that service had resumed as usual.
A request for comment from Twitter was not immediately answered, although the social network’s status page indicated that all systems were up and running.
Later on Wednesday, Musk tweeted that “significant backend server architecture changes” had been made and that “Twitter should feel faster,” but his tweet made no mention of the reported disruption.
During the outage, some users claimed they couldn’t access their Twitter accounts on desktops or laptops. A smaller number of customers claimed that the issue also impacted the mobile app’s features, like notifications.
The hashtag #TwitterDown was trending on Twitter as users flocked to the social media platform to share information and memes about the service disruption.
When some desktop users attempted to connect to Twitter, error warnings flashed: “Something went wrong, but don’t fret—it’s not your fault.” “Let’s try again.”
Musk tweeted that he was still able to use the service. In response to a user who questioned whether Twitter was broken, Musk wrote, “It works for me.”
The disruption occurs two months after Musk finished his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, which has been marked by commotion and controversy.
As per some estimates, hundreds of Twitter staff, including engineers in charge of bug fixes and preventing service disruptions, left the social media company in November.
Prior to Musk’s takeover, thousands of Twitter users experienced global outages in February and July.
Other big IT organisations have also faced outages this year. The largest telecom company in Canada, Rogers Telecommunications, experienced a nearly 19-hour service interruption in July that made it impossible for millions of people to use banking, transportation, and government services.
Also Read: 100 Starlinks Operating in Iran, Claims Elon Musk
