Twitter users in widespread locations said they were having problems with the service Wednesday night, days after Elon Musk said he shut down one of the company’s data centers in Sacramento. According to Down Detector, the issues primarily affected users of the company’s desktop site, with some complaining that the mobile app was also experiencing issues.
The cause of the malfunction was not immediately clear. Some users reported being logged out of Twitter, while others said they couldn’t see replies to their tweets but were able to access other parts of the service. Other users said they’ve encountered error messages while scrolling through their timelines, the primary feed 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 hashtag #TwitterDown was trending on the platform as users reported their experiences with the outage.
“The problems with Twitter are multi-country and widespread,” said Isik Mater, the research director of NetBlocks, an internet monitoring service. “The platform API is affected, which serves both the mobile app and many aspects of the desktop site,” she added, referring to the interface that Twitter operates on.
Mr. Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion at the end of October, said Saturday that Twitter continued to run smoothly “even after I disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks.” The billionaire has focused on cutting Twitter’s costs, eliminating supplier contracts, laying off employees and shrinking the company’s real estate footprint.
