Twitter suffered a serious outage on Wednesday, leaving tens of hundreds of users globally unable to access the favored social media platform or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back back online.
The incident is the social media site’s first apparent widespread service disruption since billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter as CEO in late October.
Downdetector, an internet site that tracks outages through a variety of sources including user reports, showed greater than 10,000 affected users from the USA, about 2,500 from Japan and about 2,500 from the UK at the height of the disruption.
Many of the reports got here from users stating they faced technical issues accessing the social network via web browser.
Reports of Twitter outages fell sharply by Wednesday evening, in line with the web site, with some users later commenting service had returned to normal.
Twitter didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment and the social network’s status page showed that each one systems were operational.
Musk tweeted afterward Wednesday that “Significant backend server architecture changes” had been rolled out and that “Twitter should feel faster”, but his post didn’t make any reference to the downtime reported by users.
In the course of the outage, some users said they were unable to log in to their Twitter account via desktops or laptops. A smaller variety of users said the difficulty also affected the mobile app and features including notifications.
Others took to Twitter to share updates and memes in regards to the service disruption, with #TwitterDown trending as a hashtag on the social media site.
Some attempts to log in to Twitter from desktops prompted an error message saying: “Something went flawed, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault. Let’s try again.”
Musk tweeted he was still in a position 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 accomplished his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, which has been marked by chaos and controversy.
Tons of of Twitter employees quit the social media company in November, by some estimates, including engineers liable for fixing bugs and stopping service outages.
1000’s of Twitter users were also hit by a worldwide outages in February and July, before Musk’s takeover.
Other big technology corporations have also been hit by outages this 12 months. In July, a near 19-hour service outage at Canada’s biggest telecom operator Rogers Telecommunications shut banking, transport and government access for tens of millions.
