Twitter users in Australia and New Zealand have been facing issues accessing the service for over 12 hours, they say, as the Elon Musk-owned social network continues to grapple with reliability challenges amid cost-cutting measures.
The outage began at around 2 pm Pacific Time Tuesday, according to user tweets and DownDetector (Australia other New Zealand), a web monitoring tool that tracks reliability issues.
The glitch, which is causing tweets to not load up for users and the service to be very laggy for others, appears to be only affecting those in Australia and New Zealand.
DownDetector’s global website shows very few complaints. It’s unclear what caused the outage.
Many users say they are able to access the service after using a VPN app. Though some users report sporadic improvements to Twitter service, complaints are still pouring in.
.@twitter is an absolute shambles today isn’t it? Operationally pathetic. I owner suspect & current CEO @elonmusk has pulled one too many server plugs out, fired too many crucial frontline staff? Consistency, reliability matters? #Musk just clueless & a propagandist. #TwitterDown
— Peter Clarke (MASTODON: @PLC@aus.social) (@MediaActive) January 4, 2023
This website is dying such a slow and painful death today. Someone put it out of its misery. #twitterdown
— Isobel Roe (@isobelroe) January 4, 2023
Twitter has been down in Australia for 12 hours now and I’m pretty sure @elonmusk has no idea there is a world outside of the USA so I assume it’ll never be fixed. I am tweeting from a VPN to ask you to click here for 60fps Bloodborne: https://t.co/qDYEQNn4ZA
— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) January 4, 2023
Twitter suffered a global outage last week after Musk said he had rolled out “significant backend server architecture changes” and that it should result in Twitter feeling “faster.”
Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in late October. He has sought to cut Twitter’s expenses by eliminating thousands of employees, many of whom worked to maintain the service’s infrastructure. Musk has also focused on making the Twitter experience faster for users by removing bloat code from the service.
