Microblogging site Twitter faced a global outage on Wednesday, affecting thousands of users worldwide. This is the first significant outage for Twitter after billionaire Elon Musk took over the company in October.
According to Downdetector, at the peak of disruption, more than 10,000 affected users from the US, 2,500 from Japan and 2,500 from the UK were affected.
Most of the reports came from users stating they faced technical issues accessing the social network via the Web browser. Reports of Twitter outages fell sharply by Wednesday evening, according to the website, with some users later commenting that the service had returned to normal.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment and the social network’s status page showed that all systems were operational. Twitter also showed a “rate-exceeding limit” to some users on Wednesday, suggesting its servers weren’t able to cope with the incoming requests. The hashtag #TwitterDown is trending on the platform.
The outage, which appears to have affected users in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, Italy and India, began at about 4 pm Pacific time. Many are also unable to access TweetDeck, a power users-focussed service from Twitter.
Musk tweeted later on Wednesday that “significant backend server architecture changes” have been rolled out and that “Twitter should feel faster”, but his post did not make any reference to the downtime reported by users. These disruptions come at a time when Musk has sought to significantly cut Twitter’s expenses by laying off thousands of employees, many of whom maintain the service’s infrastructure.