Twitter has been pretty chaotic ever since Elon Musk took over, and the latest chaotic incident is an outage at the microblogging platform. A major outage affected tens of thousands of users, as the social media site went down for hours and left users unable to access the website and several of its features.
So, if you were unable to log in to Twitter and access the website, then you’re not alone and number among the affected users. However, the service seems to be recovering now and is now up and running as impacted features are once again coming online.
What were the issues faced by the affected users? Some of them were shown the “rate-exceeding limit” message, suggesting that its servers were unable to keep up with the increasing number of incoming requests. Other users were being greeted with a blank page, while others were getting signed out of the microblogging site. Many more users were unable to respond to tweets, follow trending topics, or even see their replies. Other issues included the notifications with the mobile app.
However, even though thousands of users were unable to properly access the website properly, the Twitter CEO is not one of them. In response to a user’s question asking if Twitter was broken, the billionaire replied that the service was working for him.
Can anyone see this or is Twitter broken
— greg (@greg16676935420) December 29, 2022
Musk later tweeted that “Significant backend server architecture changes” had been rolled out and that “Twitter should feel faster.”
Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out. Twitter should feel faster.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 29, 2022
Downdetector, the internet service tracker and the place to go to in case of such outages, proved to be a goldmine of information. The website highlighted that the outage started affecting users in the UK, Canada, Germany, Italy, and India from around 4 PM Pacific Time and that 54% of them were unable to log in to the microblogging platform. 35% of users reported complaints about the website, while the remaining 12% of users reported having encountered issues with server connection.
The outage affected over 10,000 users in the US alone, along with about 2500 users from Japan and about 2500 from the US when the outage was at its peak. Reuters reports that as of 7:40 PM ET, over 10,000 users from the US reported issues, and less than an hour later, the number dropped to just over 3700.
London-based internet monitoring service NetBlocks informed that “Twitter is experiencing international outages affecting the mobile app and features including notifications,” and that the outage was unrelated to “country-level internet disruptions or filtering.”
