Major problems arose on Wednesday for Twitter Inc, making it impossible for thousands of people around the world to use the service.
At its peak, the interruption affected around 10,000 customers in the United States, around 2,500 in Japan, and around 2,500 in the United Kingdom, according to Downdetector, a website that analyses outages through several sources, including user reports.
By Wednesday evening, the website claimed, there had been a dramatic decrease in reports of Twitter outages. As of this writing, Twitter’s response to an inquiry for comment has been delayed. All services on the social network, as indicated by the status page, are currently available.
Some Twitter users were unable to access the service from their computers during the outage. The trouble extended to the smartphone app and all of its capabilities, alerts included.
Others also turned to the social media platform to report on the outage and joke about it, with the hashtag #TwitterDown trending on Twitter.
Error messages reading “Something went wrong, but don’t fret – it’s not your fault.” appeared when users attempted to access Twitter from a desktop computer. Alright, let’s give it another shot.
In a post, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said he could still access the platform. Musk responded to a user who had questioned if Twitter was down by writing, “Works for me.” Two months have passed since Musk’s chaotic and controversial $44 billion takeover of Twitter, and now the social media platform is down.
Some estimates place the number of people leaving Twitter at several hundred in November; this number includes engineers who were tasked with addressing issues and preventing service failures.
There have been problems at other large IT companies this year, too. After the largest Canadian telecom provider, Rogers Telecommunications, experienced a nearly 19-hour service outage in July, millions of people were left without access to their bank accounts, public transportation, or government services.
