Twitter appears to be recovering after users spent hours on Wednesday night reporting various errors, with the app and site throwing errors about speed limits being exceeded, being unable to retrieve new tweets or appearing to be completely broken.
down detector. com peaked at about 10,000 outage reports for Twitter, with reports beginning just after 7:30 p.m. ET. By 10:30 p.m. ET, that number had dropped to less than 1,000 reports.
Hereby The edge, we had multiple instances of the desktop site accounts suddenly logging out. When an employee clicked the login button, the site simply refreshed without prompting for a username or password – or crashed, with an error message. Since then, they can log back into their account and use the site normally again.
The mobile app worked for some people during the incident, but it didn’t for at least one Forget staff member. The problems were hard to pinpoint – they varied, disappeared and came back, as you can see from the bounce in this DownDetector chart.
Many users have reported seeing some issues with the service since Musk laid off much of the company’s workforce earlier this year. Contrary to some predictions, the site has remained largely up and running ever since, even during events like the World Cup or during Elon’s self-reported instances of disconnecting “one of the more sensitive server racks”.
However, it was an open question how quickly the site could recover from a snag, as has happened many, many times in Twitter’s history. In terms of time to recovery, Wednesday’s craziness was clearly not the big one that some people have predicted, and the recovery didn’t last very long in the end.
As for the cause of the problems, it’s hard to say – the Twitter support account has not mentioned the glitches at the time of writing, and Musk’s comment only was that the site worked for him. The company did not respond to a request for comment from The edgebut it is widely reported to have disbanded its news agency.
Update December 28, 10:30 PM ET: Updated to indicate that the partial outage appears to have ended.
