According to Downdetector, reports of the outage started in the United Kingdom, followed by Canada, Germany, Italy and France. The tracker said the vast majority of people impacted by the outage were using the Twitter website, not the app.
Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A few hours after the problems emerged, reports of outages were way down, according to the tracker, a sign that the worst had passed.
A massive global outage is an outcome that observers and analysts have feared since billionaire Elon Musk took over the company. In October, shortly before the takeover, The Washington Post reported on Musk’s internal plans to save money, which included making large cuts to the data centers that keep the site running.
Since his takeover, Musk has fired thousands of staff members, including engineers, and many others have quit, leaving Twitter with a skeleton crew.
Twitter operates three major data centers globally. Musk ordered the biggest data center in Sacramento to be shut down on Christmas, provoking anguish among ineers, according to a person familiar with the order who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
The person said that in group chats among current and former engineers on Wednesday, some speculated that the outage was triggered by a software update gone wrong.
Wednesday evening Musk tweeted that the service was working for him.
