 |
| Twitter is experiencing its first global outage of the Musk era |
Twitter suffered a major outage at dawn today (Thursday), leaving tens of thousands of users around the world unable to access the site for hours before it resumed its normal operation.
The incident was the first notable outage since billionaire Elon Musk completed control of Twitter and assumed sole management control in late October.
Downdetector, a website that specializes in monitoring outages from a variety of sources including: One user reported that more than 10,000 users in the US, about 2,500 in Japan, and about 2,500 in the UK were affected during periods of power outages.
Most of the reports came from users who said they were having technical issues accessing the social network through their web browser, but the number of reports dropped sharply this morning, with some users saying the service was back to normal.
Musk tweeted Thursday morning that Twitter had made significant changes to its database server structure and that the site would now be faster, but his tweet did not address the outages that users were experiencing.
During the outage, some users said they could not log into their Twitter accounts from desktop or laptop computers, while a small number said the issue also affected the mobile app and its features such as notifications.
Several users who have tried to log into Twitter from a desktop computer have reported an error message stating, "Something went wrong, but don't worry, it wasn't your fault. Let's try again."
As for Musk, he wrote in response to a user's question: "Can anyone see this (tweet), or is Twitter down?" He replied, "It works for me."
The outage comes two months after Twitter became Musk's personal property. During that period, which saw sweeping and controversial changes, Twitter laid off about half of its employees, about 7,500 before Musk, and others quit last November when Musk worked between long hours or shifts to make a decision. According to some reports, this staff includes engineers responsible for troubleshooting and preventing service outages.