Massive Worldwide Disruption to Twitter Appears Resolved After a Few Hours

Update, 6:57 p.m.: Twitter now appears to be functioning normally.

Although unable to tweet their frustration or ask their followers for confirmation, Twitter users worldwide reported outages of the social media giant late Wednesday afternoon (in North America) and evening (in Europe).

Shortly before 4 p.m. Pacific Time, DownDetector.com saw reports of error messages on the social media giant suddenly spike before slightly abating. Critics immediately interpreted the malfunction as an indictment of the company’s direction under the helm of erratic technologist Elon Musk, a period in which Twitter has become something of a “cesspool of misinformation” even when operating smoothly. However, by 7 p.m., the site was up and running.

Musk famously paid $44 billion for the company this fall, and his rocky tenure has already seen significant layoffs, a near-revolt among advertisers, nonpayment of rent on its Market Street headquarters, a haphazard-looking sale of office furniture and an investigation by the City of San Francisco into its practice of maintaining beds for employees to sleep in. 

After asking users via poll whether he should step down as Twitter CEO earlier this month, Musk appeared ready to search for a successor.