On Wednesday, December 28, Twitter Inc suffered a massive outage, leaving tens of thousands of users internationally unable to access or use the famous social media network for many hours before services appeared to be restored.
Since billionaire Elon Musk took over as Twitter’s CEO in late October, this is the social media site’s first apparent broad service disruption.
At the height of the disruption, Downdetector, a website that analyzes outages through a variety of sources including user reports, said that more than 10,000 people in the United States, around 2,500 users in Japan, and approximately 2,500 users in the United Kingdom were affected.
The majority of reports came from users who encountered technical difficulties when accessing the social network through web browser.
According to the website, reports of Twitter outages drastically decreased by Wednesday evening, with several users afterwards noting that service had restored to normal.
Twitter did not immediately react to a request for comment, and the status page of the social network indicated that all systems were operating.
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Musk tweeted Wednesday evening that “Significant backend server architecture improvements” had been implemented and that “Twitter should feel faster,” but he made no mention of the outages observed by users.
During the downtime, some users reported that they were unable to access their Twitter accounts using desktop computers or portable computers. Some users reported that the issue affected the mobile app and its capabilities, including notifications.
Others took to Twitter to share information and memes regarding the service outage, with the hashtag #TwitterDown trending on the social networking site.
Some desktop login attempts to Twitter resulted in an error popup stating, “Something went wrong, but it’s not your fault. Let’s try one more.”
Musk tweeted that he could still access the service.
Musk replied “Works for me” in response to a user who wondered if Twitter was broken.
Two months have passed since Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, which was defined by chaos and controversy.
According to some estimates, hundreds of Twitter employees resigned in November, including engineers responsible for addressing problems and preventing service failures.
Prior to Musk’s takeover, tens of thousands of Twitter users were affected by global disruptions in February and July.
This year, additional large technology companies have experienced outages. In July, a nearly 19-hour service interruption at Canada’s largest telecom provider Rogers Telecommunications prevented millions from accessing banking, transportation, and government services.
