Twitter suffers outage amid Elon Musk making ‘significant’ changes to backend server architecture • TechCrunch

If Twitter isn’t loading well for you, you’re not alone. Tens of thousands of users complain that they cannot access the social network owned by Elon Musk, seeing dozens of strange error messages instead. Some are greeted with a blank page while others are disconnected from the service for no apparent reason, they said. Many users also said they couldn’t see their replies, reply to tweets, or follow trending topics.

In a tweet, Musk said the company has rolled out “significant changes to the backend server architecture” and it should make Twitter feel “faster”.

Twitter also showed an “overflow limit” to some users on Wednesday (Pacific Time), suggesting its servers were unable to keep up with incoming requests. The #TwitterDown hashtag is trending on the platform.

The outage, which appears to be affecting international users in the UK, Canada, Germany, Italy and India, began around 4 p.m. PT. Third-party web monitoring services, including NetBlocks and DownDetector, have confirmed receiving user reports. DownDetector said the vast majority of complaints suggest that Twitter is largely facing a problem on the desktop.

Many are also unable to access TweetDeck, a service from Twitter geared towards power users. NetBlocks further added that the “widespread” incident is not related to “national internet outages or filtering”.

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

The service was up and running “even after taking one of the most sensitive server racks offline,” Musk tweeted on Dec. 24. Earlier this month, Twitter briefly blocked traffic from about 30 mobile carriers, mostly in the Asia-Pacific region, as part of an attempt to rid Twitter of spam, Platformer reported.