Twitter users in widespread locations said they were having problems with the service Wednesday evening, days after Elon Musk said he had shut down one of the company’s data centers in Sacramento, California. The issues primarily hit users of the company’s site for desktop computer users, according to Down Detector, while some complained that its mobile app also experienced trouble.
The cause of the outages was not immediately clear. Some users reported that they had been logged out of Twitter, while others said they could not view replies to their tweets but had access to other parts of the service. Other users said they had encountered error messages while scrolling through their timelines, the primary feed of tweets that people see when they log in to Twitter.
The errors began around 7 p.m. Eastern time, according to Down Detector, a service that monitors web outages. The hashtag #TwitterDown trended on the platform as users reported their experiences with the outage.
“The problems with Twitter exhibit in multiple countries and are widespread,” said Isik Mater, the director of research at NetBlocks, an internet monitoring service. “The platform API is affected, which serves the mobile app as well as many aspects of the desktop site,” she added, referring to the interface on which Twitter operates.
Musk, who bought Twitter in late October for $44 billion, said Saturday that Twitter continued to work smoothly, “even after I disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks.” The billionaire has been focused on reducing Twitter’s costs, eliminating contracts with vendors, laying off employees and reducing the company’s real estate footprint.
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