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- Twitter faced its first widespread outage under Elon Musk’s leadership on Wednesday evening.
- Musk responded to the reports by tweeting: “Works for me.”
- Twitter staff previously raised concerns about outages after Musk laid-off half the company’s staff.
On Wednesday, Twitter suffered its first widespread outage since Elon Musk took over the platform.
Downdetector saw around 10,000 people submit problem reports, beginning at around 5 p.m. PT. Issues were reported in several countries across North America, Europe, and Asia.
Musk responded to some unaffected users discussing the reports, saying: “Works for me.”
Twitter’s web-browser platform was primarily affected, with some users automatically logged out and greeted with the error message: “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault. Let’s try again.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter Spaces was also unusable on the mobile app.
When Musk responded to the users, tt wasn’t clear if the Twitter CEO was tweeting from his phone or the website, because Musk has removed the feature that indicates which device a tweet was sent from.
The outage appeared to be solved after three hours when Downdetector reports returned to base levels.
Fears about such an outage began after Musk laid off around half of Twitter’s 7,500 staff soon after he purchased the company. After further cuts, Twitter had around 2,300 staff in November — a nearly 70% decrease — per Insider’s Kali Hays.
A former Twitter engineer, who left before Musk’s takeover, previously told Insider: “If an issue does occur, recovery will take longer because the people tasked with maintaining core services have been laid off.”
Twitter’s last major outage was in July. According to the Wall Street Journal, there were more than five times as many reports on Downdetector, but the problem was solved within an hour.
Musk admitted to making mistakes at Twitter when he appeared on the “All-In” podcast, which was posted on Saturday. The show’s co-hosts include Jason Calacanis and David Sacks, who advised Musk when he first took over the platform.
“Hey, I just got here, man,” Musk said. “I think we’ll have fewer gaffes in the future.”
Twitter did not respond to Insider’s request for comment.
