Twitter’s Website Working as Normal After Worldwide Outage

Twitter app logo in an illustration taken on Aug. 22, 2022. Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters

Twitter’s website version is working as usual again after it appeared to stop working for thousands of people across the globe on Dec. 28.

Around 7:40 p.m. E.T., Twitter users were able to access the social media platform via apps on their mobiles or other devices, but many trying to log in via internet browsers were unable to do so.

Instead, they were greeted with the following message: “Something went wrong, but don’t fret – it’s not your fault. Let’s try again.”

According to Downdetector, which provides real-time information about website outages, Twitter was intermittently down for nearly 10,000 users across the United States, Canada, Argentina, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, and Germany for roughly two hours.

As of 11:30 p.m. E.T., just over 300 users have reported errors.

Businessman Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter in October for $44 billion, tweeted late on Wednesday that the site “works for me.”

It is unclear what caused the outage.

The Epoch Times has contacted Twitter for comment.

New Changes Under Musk

Musk has initiated a number of changes at Twitter since taking over, including slashing the company’s workforce, rolling out a paid subscriber service, and introducing a newly-revised doxxing policy banning the sharing of real-time location information or linking to external sources that share such data.

The latter decision came shortly after Musk revealed that a “crazy stalker” followed a vehicle carrying his 2-year-old son in Los Angeles and climbed on top of the car. Musk appeared to tie the alleged stalker to an account on Twitter called “Elon Musk’s Jet” which tracks the movement of his private plane.

Elon Musk's Twitter profile on a smartphone placed on printed Twitter logos on April 28, 2022. Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters

The doxxing policy states that any account sharing real-time location information of private individuals (which does not include the user themselves) will have their accounts temporarily suspended for an unspecified duration. If Twitter users do this a second time, their accounts will be permanently suspended.

On Dec. 28, Musk announced yet another change at the platform, this time relating to posts regarding science.

“New Twitter policy is to follow the science, which necessarily includes reasoned questioning of the science,” Musk wrote without providing further details.

In a follow-up tweet, he said that “Anyone who says that questioning them is questioning science itself cannot be regarded as a scientist.”

Earlier this month, Musk said he would soon resign as CEO after launching a poll on Dec. 18 asking whether he should “step down as head of Twitter.”

The results of the poll, which closed at about 6:20 a.m. ET time on Dec. 19 showed that 57.5 percent voted in favor of Musk departing the role.

“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software and servers teams,” Musk said on Twitter following the results of the poll.

Last month, Musk told a Delaware court that he’d reduce his time at Twitter and eventually find someone else to run the social media platform.

“There’s an initial burst of activity needed post-acquisition to reorganize the company,” Musk said in testimony delivered as he sought to defend against claims that his $56 billion pay package at Tesla Inc was based on easy-to-achieve performance targets and was approved by a compliant board of director.

“But then I expect to reduce my time at Twitter,” the businessman added.

Reuters contributed to this report.