Twitter is back online after a worldwide outage affected thousands

Wednesday, Twitter Inc. had a major outage that left tens of thousands of users around the world unable to access or use the popular social media platform for a few hours before services seemed to be back up and running.

Since billionaire Elon Musk took over as Twitter's CEO at the end of October 2022, this appears to be the first major issue affecting a large number of people.

At the height of the problem, Downdetector, a website that tracks outages using a variety of sources, including user reports, showed that more than 10,000 users in the United States, about 2,500 users in Japan, and about 2,500 users in the United Kingdom were affected.

Most of the reports came from people who had technical problems when they tried to use the social network through a web browser.

According to the website, reports of Twitter outages had sharply decreased by Wednesday evening, with some users later noting that service had returned to normal.

When asked for comment, Twitter didn't answer right away, and its status page said that all systems were working.

Musk tweeted Wednesday night that "significant backend server architecture changes" had been made and that "Twitter should feel faster," but he didn't say anything about the outages that users had reported.