You’re not alone if Twitter isn’t loading properly for you. Tens of thousands of users have complained that they are unable to access Elon Musk’s social network, instead seeing a slew of strange error messages.
According to them, some are being greeted with a blank page, while others are being signed out of the service for no apparent reason. Many users also reported being unable to see their replies, respond to tweets, or follow trending topics.
Musk stated in a tweet that the company has implemented “significant backend server architecture changes,” which should result in Twitter feeling “faster.”
On Wednesday (Pacific time), Twitter also displayed “rate-exceeding limit” to some users, implying that its servers were unable to handle the influx of requests. On Twitter, the hashtag #TwitterDown is trending.
The outage appears to be affecting international users in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Italy, and India and began around 4 p.m. Pacific time. Users’ reports were confirmed by third-party web monitoring services such as Netblocks and Down Detector. According to Down Detector, the vast majority of complaints indicate that Twitter is primarily experiencing problems on desktop.
Many people are also unable to access Tweet Deck, a Twitter service aimed at power users. Netblocks also stated that the “widespread” incident has nothing to do with “country-level internet disruptions or filtering.”
Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter in late October. He has sought to reduce Twitter’s costs by laying off thousands of employees, many of whom were responsible for the service’s infrastructure. Musk has also prioritized making Twitter faster for users by removing bloat code from the service.
“Even after I disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks,” Musk tweeted on December 24th, the service was still operational. Twitter briefly blocked traffic from about 30 mobile carriers, primarily in the Asia-Pacific region, earlier this month as part of an effort to rid Twitter of spam, according to Platformer.
