(Reuters) – Twitter suffered a massive outage on Wednesday, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the popular social media platform or use its key features for several hours before the services came back online.
The incident is the social networking site’s first apparent large-scale disruption of service 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 more than 10,000 affected users from the US, about 2,500 from Japan and about 2,500 from the UK at the height of the disruption.
Most of the reports came from users who said they had technical issues accessing the social network via a web browser.
Reports of the Twitter outage had abated sharply by Wednesday evening, according to the site, with some users later commenting that the service had returned to normal.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did it respond to social media status page It showed that all systems are working.
Musk later tweeted on Wednesday that “big changes to the back-end server architecture” had been posted and that “Twitter should feel faster,” but his post made no mention of the downtime reported by users.
During the outage, some users said they were unable to log into their Twitter account via desktop or laptop computers. Fewer users said the issue also affected the mobile app and features including notifications.
Others have taken to Twitter to share updates and memos about the service downtime, with #TwitterDown trending as a hashtag on the social media site.
Some attempts to log into Twitter from desktop devices 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 wrote in response to a user who asked if Twitter was down.
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 quit the social media company in November, by some estimates, including engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing 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 19-hour outage at Rogers Telecom, Canada’s largest telecommunications company, shut down banking, transportation and government income for millions.
Additional reporting by Akriti Sharma, Mrimai Day and Shubhindu Deshmukh in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Josh Horowitz in Shanghai; Editing by Krishna Chandra, Elory and Sam Holmes
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