Twitter witnessed a huge blackout on Wednesday, which blocked thousands of users worldwide from using the popular social media platform or its main features for several hours before services came back online.
The event is Twitter’s first evident service disruption on such a large scale since billionaire Elon Musk became Twitter’s CEO in late October, two months ago.
Downdetector, a website that assesses outages with the help of various sources including user reports, gave results showing more than 10,000 users who suffered in the United States, about 2,500 in Japan, and about 2,500 in the UK at the peak of the disruption.
The majority of users stated, according to reports, that they faced technical issues using the social network through the web.
Reports of Twitter service disruptions came down sharply by Wednesday evening, according to Downdetector, as some users informed sometime later that service had returned to normal.
In this regard, Musk tweeted late on Wednesday that “Significant backend server architecture changes” had been launched and that “Twitter should feel faster”, but he did not mention in his post about the downtime reported by users.
During the electric cut, some users reported they could not log in to their Twitter accounts through desktops or laptops. A small number of users confirmed that the issue also hit hard on the mobile app and features including notifications.
Many posted updates and memes on Twitter about the service fault, with #TwitterDown trending as a hashtag on the social media site.
Users said that while they were trying to log in to Twitter via desktops, an error message appeared saying: “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault. Let’s try again.”
Musk in a tweet said he was able to use the service.
“Works for me,” Musk posted, in a reply to a user who asked if Twitter was broken.
According to some estimates, hundreds of Twitter employees left the social media business in November, including engineers in charge of bug fixes and service availability.
Prior to Musk’s takeover, thousands of Twitter users experienced global outages in February and July.
This year, outages have also affected other significant IT companies. An almost 19-hour service interruption at Canada’s largest telecom provider Rogers Telecommunications in July prevented millions of people from accessing banking, transportation, and government services.
