Twitter went down for thousands of users

Many suggested it would happen, and now it has: Twitter went down. Thousands of Twitter users reported having issues accessing the website on the evening of December 28th according to comments on DownDetector. Based on people's reports, the outage started just before 7PM Eastern time, reaching its peak at around 7:44PM before returning fully after around two hours. It appears people had more problems accessing the website itself — only a fraction had difficulties loading the social network through its apps.

According to The Guardian, users who couldn't access the website were met with a message that read "something went wrong, but don't fret — it's not your fault." Elon Musk responded that he wasn't having any trouble loading the social network, but did note that "significant backend server" changes were made around the same time that should make the service "feel faster."

Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out. Twitter should feel faster.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 29, 2022

On Christmas Eve, Musk revealed that he had disconnected one of Twitter's more sensitive server racks, but that the social network remained operational. He purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October, months after initiating the acquisition and trying to back out of the deal. The company had laid off around half of the workforce and thousands of contractors since then, and one former employee told The Washington Post in November that they knew of six critical systems that "no longer have any engineers."

Isik Mater, the director of research at internet monitoring service NetBlocks, told The New York Times that "the problems with Twitter exhibit in multiple countries and are widespread." Mater also said that the "platform API is affected, which serves the mobile app as well as many aspects of the desktop site."