Twitter Back Running After Outage

Facts

• Tens of thousands of users were unable to access Twitter, according to the web monitoring tool DownDetector, and instead received error messages for several hours Wednesday. More than five hours later, the issue seemed to be resolved.
• It appeared the outage mostly affected those attempting to access the social media platform via a web browser. Many of those users were automatically logged out and shown an error message stating, “Something went wrong, but don't fret — it's not your fault. Let's try again.”
• Although it’s unknown what caused the outage, and the Twitter Support account didn’t mention anything about it, Twitter CEO Elon Musk previously tweeted the platform was rolling out “significant backend server architecture changes” to speed up the site.
• In response to complaints and discussions about the outage, Musk responded via Tweet to some users who were unaffected, “Works for me.”
• Musk, who purchased Twitter in October for $44B, has overseen a hectic transition that’s included the departure of many employees, including some who were responsible for site maintenance.

Sources: TechCrunch, Business Insider, Verge, and One America.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by Washington Post. This outage is everyone’s fears come to life. Musk was warned about his cost-slashing measures, including cutting back on staff and data centers. If there was a software update gone wrong, it might be that no one was available to deal with it. This could be a sign of more troubles ahead.
• Narrative B, as provided by NY Post. Don’t blame Musk for this outage. There were global outages in February and July, long before Musk purchased the platform. And plenty of other big technology companies, such as Rogers Telecommunications in Canada, have suffered through long outages this year. That’s the way life in the tech world goes.