Twitter is back after global outage

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
29 Dec 2022 08:17

The outage is Twitter's first visible global service disruption since billionaire Elon Musk took over as CEO in late October.

A view of the Twitter logo at its corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California, US October 27, 2022 (Reuters)

Twitter users around the world reported access issues for several hours on Wednesday, according to web monitors, in one of the largest outages since Elon Musk purchased the company.

Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out. Twitter should feel faster.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 29, 2022

Thousands of staff, including engineers, have been dismissed or departed since then, increasing concerns about Twitter's capacity to quickly resolve outages and technical issues.

Users were unable to read their main feed, check notifications, or utilize other functionalities such as lists after 7 pm Eastern time (midnight GMT), as per DownDetector.

"Can anyone see this or is Twitter broken," tweeted one user.

"Works for me," replied Musk.

DownDetector received almost 10,000 complaints in the United States during the peak of the outage, which appeared to be resolved as of 0400 GMT, as the hashtag #TwitterDown trended on the network.

The monitor received between a few hundred and several thousand reports from various nations.

According to DownDetector, the outage appeared to mostly affect individuals using Twitter's online interface. The monitor received approximately 10% of complaints from mobile app users.

The cause of the outage was not immediately clear.

Web monitor NetBlocks stated the outages were international and "not attributable to country-level internet interruptions or blocking."

Twitter is one of the most powerful social media platforms in the world, with world leaders, journalists, corporations, and celebrities using it.

Concerns over user safety on the network have grown, in addition to concerns about its technical functioning, because major layoffs struck the content moderation and misinformation teams.

There was even more uproar when Twitter allowed banned users to return, including former US President Donald Trump, who was taken off the network following the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Lately, Twitter has suspended and then restored the accounts of journalists who criticized Musk.

The South African-born billionaire claimed that his extreme expense cutbacks at Twitter have saved the firm and revealed last week that he would stand down as CEO once he finds "someone crazy enough to do the position."