Dec 28 (Reuters) – Twitter Inc suffered a major outage on Wednesday, leaving tens of thousands of users around the world unable to access the popular social media platform or use its key features for several hours before the services appear to be back online.
The incident is the first apparent widespread outage for the social networking site since billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter as chief executive in late October.
Downdetector, a website that tracks outages through a variety of sources, including user reports, showed more than 10,000 affected users from the United States, approximately 2,500 from Japan, and approximately 2,500 from the United Kingdom at the peak of the interruption.
Most of the reports came from users who claimed that they faced technical issues while accessing the social network through the web browser.
Reports of Twitter outages dropped sharply on Wednesday night, according to the website, with some users later commenting that the service was back to normal.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment and the social network status page It showed that all systems were operational.
Musk tweeted later Wednesday that “significant back-end server architecture changes” had been implemented and that “Twitter should feel faster,” but his post made no reference to user-reported downtime.
During the outage, some users said that they were unable to log into their Twitter account via desktop or laptop computers. A smaller number of users said the issue also affected the mobile app and features, including notifications.
Others took to Twitter to share updates and memes about the outage, with #TwitterDown trending on the social media site.
Some attempts to log in to Twitter from desktop computers resulted in an error message saying, “Something went wrong, but don’t worry, it’s not your fault. Let’s try again.”
Musk tweeted that he was still able to use the service.
“It works for me,” Musk posted, responding to a user who asked if Twitter was broken.
The outage comes two months after Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, which has been marked by chaos and controversy.
Hundreds of Twitter employees have resigned from the social media company Novemberby some estimates, including engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing service interruptions.
Thousands of Twitter users were also affected by a global blackout February Y Julybefore the Musk acquisition.
Other big tech companies have also been hit by outages this year. In July, a service interruption of almost 19 hours in Canada’s largest telecommunications operator Rogers Telecommunications shut down banking, transportation, and government access to millions.
Reporting by Akriti Sharma, Mrinmay Dey and Shubhendu Deshmukh in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Josh Horwitz in Shanghai; Edited by Krishna Chandra Eluri and Sam Holmes
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