Twitter users around the world reported access errors for several hours. Monitor said Wednesday, in the biggest shutdown since Elon Musk bought the platform.
Twitter has been in chaos ever since. Controversial The billionaire completed his $44 billion acquisition in October and quickly moved to cut costs.
Thousands of employees — including engineers — have since been fired or let go, raising concerns about Twitter’s ability to quickly fix outages and technical problems.
DownDetector reported an increase in problems with Twitter starting at 7pm Eastern Time (midnight GMT), with users unable to view their main feed, check notifications or use other functions such as lists. .
“Can anyone see this or is Twitter broken,” one user tweeted.
“Works for me,” Musk replied.
At the peak of the outage – which appeared to be resolved by 0400 GMT – DownDetector received more than 10,000 complaints in the United States, as the hashtag #TwitterDown was trending on the platform.
The number of reports logged by monitors from other countries ranged from a few hundred to several thousand.
According to DownDetector’s breakdown, the outage appears to primarily affect people using Twitter on the web interface. About 10 percent of the complaints registered by the monitor were from mobile app users.
The reason for the outage was not immediately clear.
Web monitor NetBlocks said the outage was international and “not related to country-level internet blockages or filtering”.
Twitter is one of the world’s most influential social media platforms, used by world leaders, media, businesses and celebrities.
In addition to concerns about its technical operations, concerns about the safety of users on the platform have also grown after mass layoffs targeted content moderation and disinformation teams.
Further controversy arose when Twitter allowed banned users to return to the platform, including former US President Donald Trump, who was kicked out after storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Twitter also suspended and then reinstated the accounts of journalists critical of Musk.
The South African-born billionaire has said that his drastic cost-cutting at Twitter has saved the company, and announced last week that he would “find someone stupid enough to take the job”. So he will step down as CEO.