Elon Musk denies issues with Twitter as thousands report outage

NME

Elon Musk has responded to thousands of people reporting issues using Twitter by saying it “works for me”.

Shortly before midnight last night (December 28) DownDetector, a website which tracks traffic on Twitter, reported that the social media site was having issues.

While many users were still able to use Twitter, others received an error message that said “something went wrong, but don’t fret – it’s not your fault”.

Internet observatory Netblocks also confirmed an issue. “Twitter is experiencing international outages affecting the mobile app and features including notifications The incident is not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering. #TwitterDown.”

Note: Twitter is experiencing international outages affecting the mobile app and features including notifications; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering #TwitterDown pic.twitter.com/eA3n5ow1aZ

— NetBlocks (@netblocks) December 29, 2022

However Twitter boss Elon Musk seemed to deny any such issues. “Can anyone see this, or is Twitter broken,” asked one user. “Works for me,” replied Musk.

A few hours later, Musk confirmed “significant backend server architecture changes” had been rolled out. “Twitter should feel faster,” he added.

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

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 29, 2022

Elon Musk took over Twitter in October and immediately fired several top executives and half of its workforce.

The layoffs reportedly gutted teams that covered human rights, machine learning ethics, curation, communications, accessibility and moderation at Twitter.

Musk followed that up by telling the remaining staff they “work long hours at high intensity” or leave the company. Users were then advised to archive their Twitter history after speculation the platform could collapse. 

Earlier this month, Elon Musk said he will step down from his role as CEO of Twitter as soon as he finds “someone foolish enough to take the job”.

“After that, I will just run the software & servers teams,” he added. It comes after Musk asked Twitter users if he should resign, with over 57 per cent of people voting “yes” in the poll.

During his time as CEO of Twitter, Musk has banned then unbanned several journalists who wrote about him, stopped the platform’s COVID misinformation policy and seen the use of antisemitic, homophobic, racist and transphobic language on Twitter spike. He has added a feature that allows users to see how many times their Tweets have been viewed though.

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