Couldn’t log into your Twitter account overnight Wednesday through Thursday? You are not the only one. The website Downdetector identified up to around 10,000 reports of Internet users struggling to use the social network, with a peak around 12:35 a.m., before the reports subsided. Some users couldn’t log in to their own account or couldn’t view certain accounts. The extent of the outage was not immediately known, but AFP journalists in the United States and Asia reported having difficulty accessing their accounts.
Outages regularly disrupt digital platforms, with long service interruptions remaining the exception. This technical hitch, however, comes at a sensitive time for Twitter, in turmoil since its acquisition by Elon Musk for 44 billion dollars at the end of October. The multi-entrepreneur notably laid off many employees, including among the teams dealing with the technical maintenance of the platform. To a user who asked him on Wednesday if Twitter was “broken”, Elon Musk replied: “It works for me. »
Outside the United States, the number of users unable to access the service varied from a few hundred to several thousand. According to DownDetector’s breakdown, the outage appeared to primarily affect people using Twitter on the web interface. Around 10% of the complaints recorded by the monitor came from mobile app users. The cause of the outage was not immediately known. According to the Web Observatory NetBlocks these are international outages and “not related to domestic internet disruptions or filtering”.