Elon Musk says ‘significant’ architecture changes rolled out after Twitter outage

Elon Musk says that the worldwide Twitter outage that users experienced on Wednesday night is now fixed. Nothing to look at here!

On Wednesday evening, Twitter experienced a worldwide outage that affected tens of thousands of users on the platform. Users who were trying to use Twitter say themselves logged out and unable to get back in, tweets not loading at all, and even those who were logged out saw nothing when trying to look at the recently changed Twitter homepage.

At its peak, Downdetector was seeing over 10,000 reports a minute from users impacted by the issue. The outage lasted around a few hours, and users were eventually able to get back into the website or app.

At almost midnight Eastern Standard Time, Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the company was rolling out some “significant backend server architecture changes” and that Twitter should feel faster now. While it’s unclear if Twitter feels faster, it is at least working again.

It’s unclear if the backend changes that Musk was referring to was the actual cause of the temporary outage, but the timing is certainly suspect. Many app changes can result in temporary outages depending on how an app operates, so it’s not a far-flung idea to think that the company took the app down temporarily to make some updates.

If that was the case, letting everyone know it was going to happen might have been a better move than letting the internet descend into chaos for a few hours last night. Then again, Musk would probably enjoy the notion of that happening.

This isn’t the first time that Twitter saw something disappear and then reappear this month. Over the weekend, the app’s suicide prevention feature disappeared temporarily but then reappeared again. Twitter says that it was making updates to the feature to improve prompts.