Twitter outage hits thousands of users globally

Twitter Inc suffered a major outage on Wednesday, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the popular social media platform or use its key features.

Downdetector, a website that tracks outages through a range of sources including user reports, showed more than 10,000 affected users from the United States, about 2,500 from Japan and about 2,500 from the UK at the peak of the disruption.

Reports of Twitter outages fell sharply by Wednesday evening, according to the website.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The social network's status page shows that all systems are operational.

During the outage, some users were unable to log in to their Twitter account via desktops or laptops. The issue also affected the mobile app and features including notifications.

Others took to Twitter to share updates and memes about the service disruption, with #TwitterDown trending as a hashtag on the social media site.

Some attempts to log in to Twitter from the desktop prompted an error message saying: "Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault. Let’s try again."

Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted he was still able to use the service.

"Works for me," Musk posted in response to a user who asked if Twitter was broken.

The outage comes two months after Musk's $44 billion takeover of Twitter, which has been marked by chaos and controversy.

Hundreds of Twitter employees quit the social media company in November, by some estimates, including engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing service outages.

Other big technology companies have also been hit by outages this year. In July, a near 19-hour service outage at Canada's biggest telecom operator Rogers Telecommunications shut banking, transport and government access for millions.