Twitter victim of a technical incident. The social network recently acquired by Elon Musk suffered a giant blackout that lasted several hours on the night of December 28 to 29. Several thousand users were unable to connect to the platform’s web interface.
An international breakdown
According to user reports on the specialized site Downdetector, the incident began around 12:48 a.m. Wednesday evening and ended early Thursday morning, between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. At the height of the outage, over 8800 reports were generated. 82% of the issues were with Twitter’s web interface and 10% with the mobile app.
For its part, the monitoring organization NetBlocks evoked “international outages affecting the mobile app and functionality, including notifications.“These incidents seemed to come directly from Twitter and not from”disruptions or internet filtering at country level.“
ℹ️ Note: Twitter is experiencing international outages affecting the mobile app and features including notifications; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering #TwitterDownpic.twitter.com/eA3n5ow1aZ
—NetBlocks (@netblocks) December 29, 2022
From Japan to the United States via Great Britain, the blackout seems to have affected all continents without exception. However, the Twitter API Status page, which tracks problems related to the social network, has not mentioned any incident in the past few hours.
No problem according to Musk
Users attempting to log in to the site during the crash could encounter a classic application error message: “Something went wrong, but don’t worry, it’s not your fault. Let’s try again.“
Hours after the incidents began, Elon Musk announced, “important changes […] made to the architecture of the back-end server“, without specifying whether there was a link with the global outage of the application. And the billionaire to assure: “Twitter should be faster.“
Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out. Twitter should feel faster.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 29, 2022
Earlier, Musk had assured that the social network was working properly on his side.
For now, the global outage has not been publicly confirmed by Twitter. The incident of the last hours is the first since the takeover of the social network by Elon Musk. Shortly after his arrival at the controls, the businessman had made a drastic cut in the company’s workforce.
Several engineers responsible for fixing bugs and avoiding service outages also left the company during this period, recalls the Reuters agency. Contacted by our colleagues, the platform did not react.