Twitter Back Online After Global Outage

Tom Jowitt,
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Twitless - twitter down © Fotolia

Early hours outage at Twitter – the first major disruption at the platform after Elon Musk sacked most of the workforce

Twitter is back up and working after a significant outage impacted the micro-blogging platform in the early hours of Thursday morning.

According to the Downdetector fault tracking website, users began reporting problems with Twitter from 1am GMT, with reports tailing off around 5am on Thursday morning.

This is the first significant disruption since Elon Musk took control of the platform in late October, and it comes after he sacked or let go most of its workforce.

twitter, social media

Twitter outage

According to the Downdetector website, the Twitter outage impacted more than 10,000 users from the United States, about 2,500 from Japan and about 2,500 from the UK at the peak of the disruption.

Most of the reports came from users stating they faced technical issues accessing the social network via web browser, and other also reported problems with logins.

A smaller number of users said the issue also affected the mobile app, as well as notifications.

The social network’s status page however showed that all systems have been fully operational over the past 24 hours.

Indeed, the status page even failed to acknowledge there had been any outage at all.

Elon Musk on Thursday morning offered up a potential clue as to the reason for the outage, when he tweeted that there has been “significant backend server changes rolled out.”

And Musk seemed to dismiss user reports of problems, when he tweeted he was still able to use the service.

“Works for me,” Musk posted, responding to a user who asked if Twitter was broken.

Chaotic rule

The outages comes after Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, and his ownership of the platform has been marked by chaos and controversy.

It is reported in media outlets that among the Twitter staff let go or fired, were engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing service outages.

But it should be remembered that Twitter has experienced outages before Elon Musk took control, including outages in February and July this year.