The event is Twitter’s first visible global service disruption since billionaire Elon Musk took over as CEO in late October.
At the peak of the disruption, Downdetector, a website that detects outages using a variety of sources including user reports, reported more than 10,000 affected users from the United States, about 2,500 from Japan, and about 2,500 from the United Kingdom.
The majority of the reports came from individuals who said they were having technical difficulties accessing the social network through a web browser.
According to the website, reports of Twitter outages had dropped drastically by Wednesday evening, with several users afterwards reporting that the service had returned to normal.
Twitter did not reply immediately to a comment request, although the social network’s status page indicated that all systems were working.
Musk later tweeted that “significant backend server architecture improvements” had been implemented and that “Twitter should feel faster,” but he made no mention of the disruption noticed by users.
Some users reported being unable to access their Twitter accounts using desktops or laptops during the outage. A lesser number of customers reported that the problem also affected the mobile app and functionality such as alerts.
Others took to Twitter to share updates and memes about the service outage, with the hashtag #TwitterDown trending on the social media site.
Some efforts to log in to Twitter from desktop computers resulted in the following error message: “Something went wrong, but don’t worry because it wasn’t your fault. Let us try once more.”
Musk tweeted he was still able to use the service.
“Works for me,” Musk posted, responding to a user who asked if Twitter was broken.
The outage comes two months after Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, which has been marked by chaos and controversy.
Hundreds of Twitter employees quit the social media company in November, by some estimates, including engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing service outages.
Thousands of Twitter users were also hit by global outages in February and july, before Musk’s takeover.
Other big technology companies have also been hit by outages this year. In July, a near 19-hour service outage at Canada’s biggest telecom operator at Rogers Telecommunications shut banking, transport and government access for millions.
