Twitter back online after global outage
Twitter was unavailable to tens of thousands of users worldwide on December 28 due to a significant outage, which lasted for several hours before services appeared to be restored.
Since billionaire Elon Musk became CEO of Twitter in late October, the event marks the social media platform’s first apparent significant service disruption.
At the height of the issue, there were over 10,000 affected users in the US, over 2,500 in Japan, and about 2,500 in the UK, according to Downdetector, a website that analyzes outages through various sources, including user reports.
Most of the reports came from individuals complaining about having trouble using their web browsers to access social networks.
According to the website, by Wednesday night, reports of Twitter outages had drastically decreased. Later, some users commented that the service had resumed as usual.
While the social network’s status page indicated that all systems were operating, Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk did not mention the user-reported unavailability in his later Wednesday tweet, which claimed that “Significant backend server architecture improvements” had been implemented and that “Twitter should feel faster.”
Some users reported that during the outage, they could not access their Twitter accounts on desktop computers or laptops. Only a small percentage of customers claimed that the problem also affected the mobile app and its functionalities, such as notifications.
Others used Twitter to post updates and memes about the service disruption, with the hashtag #TwitterDown becoming popular on the social networking platform.
A notice stating: “Something went wrong, but don’t worry – it’s not your fault”, appeared when some desktop users attempted to log in to Twitter. Musk tweeted that he may still utilize the service.
Musk replied to a user who questioned whether Twitter was broken by writing, “Works for me.”
The disruption occurred two months after Musk finished his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, which has been marred by commotion and controversy.
Before Musk’s takeover in February and July, thousands of Twitter users experienced global disruptions.