Thousands of global Twitter users have reported the website going down in the past few hours with Elon Musk blaming “significant backend server architecture changes” that should make the platform “feel faster.”
Around midnight GMT (4 p.m. PST), the global detection site downdetector.com reported a huge spike in Twitter users getting in touch, which quickly hit the 10,000 figure.
Some users reported receiving an error message stating “something went wrong, but don’t fret – it’s not your fault”.
The spike calmed down for about an hour then rose to the 5,000 mark just after 1 a.m GMT (5 p.m. PST) before again returning to normal in the early hours of the morning of December 29.
As ever, all eyes were trained on maybe-soon-to-depart CEO Musk’s response to the outages.
Responding to one user, he first said “works for me” when others were reporting outages before tweeting a few hours later: “Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out. Twitter should feel faster.”
It is hard to gauge at this point what changes have been made or when they will take effect.
Musk’s reign following his $44BN October Twitter buyout has been littered with chaos and u-turns.
Having laid off at least half of the tech giant’s staff, Musk most recently said he would step down as CEO once he found “someone foolish enough to take the job” after polling users of the site to ask if he should no longer be at the helm – with 57% voting “Yes.”
In the past fortnight, he has walked back a hastily-assembled policy banning promotion of other platforms and reinstated a number of journalists who had been suspended following Musk’s claim that they had “doxxed his location.”
EU staffers had previously threatened sanctions against self-professed free speech warrior Musk for failing to respect the Digital Services Act in light of the suspension of journalists.