Twitter outage: Elon Musk says ‘works for me’ as users report problems with website

Twitter users have reported a massive global outage with many unable to access the website and its features for hours.

According to downdetector.com, which tracks site traffic, the website became unavailable shortly before midnight GMT (11am Thursday AEDT, 7pm Wednesday EST), with outages most commonly reported on website rather than the app.

Within an hour, the website had recorded more than 10,000 user reports of problems accessing Twitter.

The London-based internet monitor NetBlocks said “Twitter is experiencing international outages affecting the mobile app and features including notifications”.

“The incident is not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering.”

Many users were still able to use the platform, while others were met with an error message that read “something went wrong, but don’t fret – it’s not your fault”.

One user in Ireland reported “difficulties logging into Twitter tonight … I’m supposed to be asleep but now I’m watching news stories on the global twitter crash”.

Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44bn in October, responded to users reporting problems by tweeting “works for me”.

Hours later, Musk tweeted that “significant backend server architecture changes” had been made and that “Twitter should feel faster”.

Concerns about longer and more regular outages increased when Twitter slashed, by some estimates, up to half of its workforce with little notice under Musk’s tenure.

About 50 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 staff were sacked in Musk’s first week. In his second week, about four in five of the firm’s 5,500 contractors were released.

The mass layoffs reportedly gutted teams that cover human rights, machine learning ethics, curation, communications and accessibility.

In July, before the job losses, Twitter experienced one of its longest outages for years, with the social network unavailable to users on web and mobile for almost an hour.

Earlier this month, Musk confirmed he would step down as chief executive once a suitable replacement was found, citing the company’s finances as a reason to delay his promised departure.