Elon Musk Says “Significant” Backend Upgrades “Rolled Out” At Twitter Amid International Outage

Twitter users globally struggled to access the social media platform Wednesday evening. There were reports of glitches and other issues; some users said they received error messages or were logged out. Elon Musk tweeted after the disruption that backend upgrades were being completed. 

As the outages spread, the hashtag “#TwitterDown” trended, and by 7:13 pm EST, outage detection website Downdetector reported a surge in users that indicated the social media platform was experiencing outages. More than 9,000 users on Downdetector reported issues. 

Here’s a timeline of the outage. 

The disruption was the largest since Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twiter, axing three-quarters of its workforce. Users from New York to San Francisco to Hong Kong all reported disruptions. The number of glitches has since dissipated early Thursday. 

My retweets are currently broken. #TwitterDown pic.twitter.com/SK0RAGfLnn

— David Lytle (@davitydave) December 29, 2022

ℹ️ Note: Twitter is experiencing international outages affecting the mobile app and features including notifications; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering #TwitterDown pic.twitter.com/eA3n5ow1aZ

— NetBlocks (@netblocks) December 29, 2022

More than an hour into disruptions, Musk replied, “works for me,” when asked by one user about outages. 

Works for me

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 29, 2022

Then around midnight, Musk provided an answer to why the disruptions were happening. He said:

“Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out. Twitter should feel faster.” 

Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out. Twitter should feel faster.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 29, 2022

While it’s hard to say if backend upgrades at Twitter have made the social media experience meaningfully faster, Musk has said he would step down as CEO once he found “someone foolish enough to take the job,” adding that he would “just run software & servers teams.”