A vast outage temporarily affected access to Twitter on Thursday, many users around the world finding themselves faced with an error message, new turbulence for the social network already mired in a battle with Elon Musk.
Many users reported earlier this afternoon error messages saying “overcapacity” or even errors saying “this page is down”.
The extent of the outage was not immediately known and the platform did not immediately respond to a request from AFP. But the Downdetector site has identified nearly 55,000 reports of Internet users prevented from using the platform, the first having appeared around 11:50 am.
Although the main domain Twitter.com loaded, it was not possible to log into the service or access tweets for almost an hour.
A first for the social network
This is Twitter’s first major outage since a series of problems the social network experienced earlier this year. In February, Twitter experienced two outages in one week, with users unable to access the service in parts of the United States due to a “technical bug that prevented timelines from loading and tweets from being posted”.
Twitter’s latest service issues come just days after the social network filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. The latter is trying to end a $44 billion acquisition deal by claiming that Twitter has failed to respond to requests for information about bot and spam activity on the platform.