Twitter users report widespread service outages

Twitter users in many locations said they were having trouble with the service Wednesday night, days after Elon Musk said he had shut down one of the company’s data centers in Sacramento. According to Down Detector, the problems mainly affected users of the company’s site for desktop users, while some complained that its mobile app was also experiencing issues.

The cause of the outages was not immediately clear. Some users reported being signed out of Twitter, while others said they couldn’t see replies to their tweets but had access to other parts of the service. Other users said they encountered error messages when scrolling through their timeline, the main stream of tweets people see when they log into Twitter.

The errors started around 7 p.m. Eastern Time, according to Down Detector, a service that monitors web outages. The #TwitterDown hashtag trended on the platform as users reported their experiences with the outage.

“Twitter issues are happening in multiple countries and are widespread,” said Isik Mater, research director at NetBlocks, an internet monitoring service. “The platform API is affected, which serves the mobile app as well as many aspects of the desktop site,” she added, referring to the interface that Twitter runs on.

Mr. Musk, who bought Twitter in late October for $44 billion, said saturday that Twitter continued to function properly, “even after taking one of the most sensitive server racks offline”. The billionaire focused on cutting Twitter’s costs, eliminating vendor contracts, laying off employees and shrinking the company’s real estate footprint.