Twitter suffered outage after Elon Musk made ‘significant’ backend server architecture changes

Twitter has resolved an issue that caused a widespread outage earlier Wednesday (Pacific time), according to web monitoring tool DownDetector. The site acted up weirdly for over five hours for many users. Our original story follows.

If Twitter isn’t loading fine for you, you’re not alone. Tens of thousands of users are complaining that they are unable to access the Elon Musk-owned social network, seeing scores of strange error messages instead. Some are being greeted with a blank page while others are getting signed out of the service for no apparent reason, they said. Many users also said they were unable to see their replies, respond to tweets or follow trending topics.

In a tweet, Musk said the firm has rolled out “significant backend server architecture changes” and that it should result in Twitter feeling “faster.”

Twitter also showed “rate-exceeding limit” to some users on Wednesday (Pacific time), suggesting its servers weren’t able to cope up with the incoming requests. The hashtag #TwitterDown is trending on the platform.

The outage, which appears to be affecting international users in the U.K., Canada, Germany, Italy and India, began at about 4 p.m. Pacific time. Third-party web monitoring services including NetBlocks and DownDetector confirmed receiving reports from users. DownDetector said the vast majority of complaints suggest that Twitter is largely facing an issue on desktop.

Many are also unable to access TweetDeck, a power users-focused service from Twitter. NetBlocks additionally added that the “widespread” incident is not related to “country-level internet disruptions or filtering.”

Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in late October. He has sought to cut Twitter’s expenses by eliminating thousands of employees, many of whom worked to maintain the service’s infrastructure. Musk has also focused on making the Twitter experience faster for users by removing bloat code from the service.

The service was operational “even after I disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks,” Musk tweeted on December 24. Earlier this month, Twitter briefly blocked traffic from about 30 mobile carriers, mainly in the Asia-Pacific region, as part of an attempt to rid Twitter of spam, Platformer reported.

The story and headline were updated after Twitter resolved the issue.