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Twitter Outage: Thousands of Users Report Problems With Website

The social network showed error messages to Twitter users trying to log on to the website through their desktop computers.

Queenie Wong Former Senior Writer
Queenie Wong was a senior writer for CNET News, focusing on social media companies including Facebook's parent company Meta, Twitter and TikTok. Before joining CNET, she worked for The Mercury News in San Jose and the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon. A native of Southern California, she took her first journalism class in middle school.
Expertise I've been writing about social media since 2015 but have previously covered politics, crime and education. I also have a degree in studio art. Credentials
  • 2022 Eddie award for consumer analysis
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Queenie Wong
2 min read
Twitters logo on a phone, with the imagery of a gunshot shattering the glass

Twitter has 238 million daily users.

 James Martin/CNET

Twitter appeared to experience a widespread service disruption on Wednesday, with thousands of users reporting trouble logging in to the desktop version of the platform. 

"Something went wrong, but don't fret -- it's not your fault," an error message that popped up for Twitter's desktop users read. "Let's try again."

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Twitter showed this error message to users trying to log in to the website on their computers.

 Screenshot by Queenie Wong/CNET

Data from Downdetector, a website that tracks outages, shows that after 4:38 p.m. PST more than 10,880 users reported having trouble logging in to Twitter. Roughly 83% of users who experienced problems with Twitter said they had issues with the desktop version. 

Internet monitoring service NetBlocks tweeted that Twitter is experiencing "international outages affecting the mobile app and features including notifications."

The outage hits the beleaguered social network after roughly two months of upheaval since billionaire Elon Musk took it over. 

Fears about Twitter's potential death heightened on Nov. 17 after hundreds of Twitter employees resigned from the social media company. Musk reportedly gave workers a choice of working long hours to build "a breakthrough Twitter 2.0" or leave the company with severance pay. Twitter had already laid off 3,700 employees, or half of Twitter's workforce, and 4,400 contract workers, massive cuts that were expected to impact content moderation and the services that help keep the site running.

#Twitterdown is trending on Twitter in the US. Twitter, which appears to no longer have a communications department, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some Twitter users asked if the platform was broken. "Works for me," Musk replied in a tweet on Wednesday night.