Twitter back online after global outage affects thousands

Twitter suffered a major outage on Wednesday, preventing tens of thousands of users worldwide from accessing the popular social media platform or using its main features for several hours before the services appeared to come back online .

The incident is the social media site’s first apparent widespread outage since billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter as CEO in late October.

Downdetector, a website that tracks outages through a range of sources including user reports, showed over 10,000 affected users in the US, around 2,500 in Japan and around 2,500 in the UK at the height of the disturbance.

Most of the reports came from users who said they encountered technical problems accessing the social network through a web browser.

Reports of Twitter outages dropped sharply on Wednesday evening, 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’s status page showed all systems were up and running.

Musk tweeted later Wednesday that “significant changes to the main server architecture” had been rolled out and “Twitter should feel faster,” but his post made no reference to user-reported downtime.

During the outage, some users reported that they were unable to log into their Twitter account via desktop or laptop computers. A smaller number of users said the issue also affects the mobile app and functionality, including notifications.

Others took to Twitter to share updates and memes about the service disruption, with #TwitterDown trending as a hashtag on the social media site.

Some attempts to login 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.

“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 takeover of Twitter, which was marred by chaos and controversy.

By some estimates, hundreds of Twitter employees left the social media company in November, including engineers tasked with fixing bugs and preventing service outages.

Thousands of Twitter users were also affected by a global outage in February and July, before Musk’s takeover.

Other big tech companies have also been hit by outages this year. In July, a nearly 7-hour outage at Canada’s largest telecommunications operator, Rogers Telecommunications, cut off access to banking, transportation and government services to millions of people.