The social media platform Twitter Inc. experienced a widespread global outage late Wednesday evening that affected thousands of users at approximately 7 p.m. EST.
The problem did not affect all Twitter users, but according to Downdetector, a website that tracks service outages and disruptions, more than 10,000 users in the U.S. reported problems at its peak.
The majority of users, 82%, reported problems with the website, with 10% having issues with the app and 8% reporting server connection problems.
Twitter’s troubles were widespread enough that Downdetector reported that users from Germany, Italy, Canada and France also reported outages. The website also registered approximately 2,500 from Japan and 2,500 from the United Kingdom during the outage’s peak.
Without acknowledging the outage, Twitter Chief Executive Elon Musk tweeted hours later: “Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out. Twitter should feel faster.”
Since taking over Twitter in a deal worth $44 billion, Musk has embroiled the company in multiple controversies. Including mass layoffs of Twitter staff, affecting more than 50% of the company’s workforce, which gutted engineering and coding teams, most likely leading to potential outages such as this one for the social media platform.
This is the second outage in the past few months. An extreme heat wave in California took out the company’s Sacramento data center in September causing the network to go dark for some users. Musk ordered that same data center to be shut down before Christmas, reported the Washington Post, leaving Twitter with only two data centers globally.
During the outage, Musk tweeted that the service was still working for him.
