It is not possible to refresh tweet threads on the social network. GIVEN RUVIC / REUTERS
Several countries, including France, were affected by difficulties accessing the social network this Wednesday morning.
«An error has occurred“, could we read on the home page of Twitter. The social network bought by Elon Musk suffered from malfunctions this Wednesday at midday. It was thus impossible to update the threads of tweets and to see the last ones published. According to the Downdetector site, which lists user reports, the social network has suffered a widespread outage in several countries around the world.
In France, reports began around 11 a.m. and stood at more than 1,400 at 11:30 a.m. However, they seem to be coming down again, with 314 reports at 12:30 p.m. Other failure reports have also been recorded in India, the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy and Japan. So far, Twitter has not commented on the outage.
The network has already suffered from technical issues in recent months, including in late December, when some users could not log into their own account or could not view certain accounts. Outages regularly disrupt digital platforms, with long service interruptions remaining the exception.
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A sensitive context
This technical hitch, however, comes at a sensitive time for Twitter, in turmoil since its acquisition by Elon Musk for 44 billion dollars at the end of October. The multi-entrepreneur has notably laid off many employees, including among the teams dealing with the technical maintenance of the platform, and has initiated several projects, including paid certification or the modification of tweets.
According to Jasmine Enberg, analyst at Insider Intelligence, the social network, which had more than 368 million monthly users worldwide in 2022, will lose some 32 million by 2024, put off by the proliferation of toxic content and / or by the increase in the number of breakdowns. “The staff is reduced to a skeleton, so there are very few people to deal with technical problems and those relating to content moderation“, she explained.