Twitter Inc users around the world reported errors accessing it for several hours, Web monitors said on Wednesday, in one of the biggest outages since chief executive officer Elon Musk bought the platform.
Twitter has been riven by chaos since the controversial billionaire completed his US$44 billion acquisition in October and quickly moved to cut costs.
Thousands of employees — including engineers — have since been fired or quit, raising concerns about Twitter’s ability to quickly fix outages and technical problems.
Photo: Reuters
Downdetector reported a spike in issues with Twitter starting at about 7pm Eastern time, with users unable to see their main feed, check notifications or use other functions such as lists.
“Can anyone see this or is Twitter broken,” one user wrote on the platform.
“Works for me,” Musk said.
At the peak of the outage, Downdetector clocked more than 10,000 complaints in the US, as the hashtag #TwitterDown trended on the platform.
The number of reports logged by the monitor from other countries ranged from a few hundred to several thousand.
Downdetector’s breakdown showed that the outage appeared to affect people using Twitter on the Web interface.
About 10 percent of complaints logged by the monitor were from cellphone app users.
The cause of the outage was not immediately clear.
The outages were international and “not related to country-level Internet disruptions or filtering,” Web monitor NetBlocks said.
Twitter is one of the world’s most influential social media platforms, used by world leaders, media, businesses and celebrities.
In addition to worries about its technical operations, fears have also grown about user safety on the platform after the mass layoffs hit content moderation and misinformation teams.
There was further controversy when Twitter allowed banned users to return to the platform, including former US president Donald Trump, whose account was deactivated following the storming of the US Capitol on Jan. 6 last year.
Twitter also suspended — and then restored — the accounts of journalists critical of Musk.
The South African-born billionaire has said his severe cost cuts at Twitter have saved the company. He announced last week that he would step down as CEO once he finds “someone foolish enough to take the job.”
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