Twitter witnessed a major outage yesterday, Wednesday; This prevented tens of thousands of users worldwide from accessing the popular social media platform or using its main features before it returned to work.
This is the first clear outage of service on a large scale for Twitter since billionaire Elon Musk took over as CEO of the company in late October.
As more than 10,000 users in the United States, about 2,500 from Japan, and nearly 2,500 from Britain were affected by that outage at its peak.
The reports came mostly from users who said they had technical problems accessing the social network through a web browser.
But reports of outages on Twitter had dropped sharply by Wednesday evening, and users later spoke of it returning to normal.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The status page of the social network shows that all systems are working.
Musk tweeted later on Wednesday, speaking of introducing “significant changes in the server backend,” adding that “it should feel (in light of that) that (site) Twitter has become faster,” but his post did not refer to the downtime reported by users.
During the outage, some users were unable to log into their Twitter accounts via desktop or laptop computers.
The issue also affected the Twitter mobile app and features, including notifications.
On some attempts to log into Twitter, an error message appeared saying, “Something went wrong, but don’t worry – it’s not your fault. Let’s try again.” However, Musk tweeted that he was still able to use the service.
“Works for me,” Musk wrote in response to a user who asked if Twitter was down.
The outage comes two months after Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, in a deal marred by chaos and controversy.
Hundreds of Twitter employees quit last November, by some estimates, including engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing outages.
Other big tech companies have also been hit by outages this year. Last July, a nearly 19-hour outage at Rogers Telecommunications (Canada’s largest telecommunications company) shut down banks, interrupted transportation, and left millions unable to access government websites.
