Twitter users in Australia and New Zealand reported difficulty accessing the social media site for several hours on Wednesday – its second outage in the past few weeks.
The website Downdetector received thousands of reports from about 7am AEST on Wednesday saying that load times for the site were slow, they were given error messages, or they were unable to access it entirely.
“Feed has a 50-50 chance of not loading and timing out,” one user posted.
Several users blamed Twitter’s new owner.
“Hope Elon regrets firing everyone,” one said, referring to Elon Musk’s huge round of job cuts at the company after he took over.
“Profile and feed not loading. Thanks Elon!” another said.
Twitter users in Australia who were able to send tweets reported the site had slowed down significantly.
The issue appeared to be limited to users based in Australia and New Zealand, with some users reporting being able to use a virtual private network (VPN) to access the website as normal via the US.
At the time of publication, Twitter had not acknowledged the issue. Guardian Australia attempted to seek comment from Twitter, however since Musk took over the company it no longer has a communications team.
Is it just me or is @Twitter really really slow today?
— Nabil Al Nashar | نبيل النشار (@NabilAlNashar) January 3, 2023
Twitter is struggling today 🐤
— Anthony Macali ✈️🧪 (@migga) January 3, 2023
It follows a significant global outage on the desktop version of the website at the end of December. At the time, Musk tweeted that the site was working for him, that “significant backend server architecture changes” had been made and “Twitter should feel faster”.
After Musk initially purchased the platform for US$44bn, and sacked approximately 50% of staff and the majority of its contractors, there had been fears that the departure of expert staff would over time lead to outages for the website.
Musk has been attempting to slash costs for the business as the company will need to pay US$1bn a year in interest payments for the purchase.
12 months ago, I was Person of the Year
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 4, 2023
Late last month Musk defended the cost cuts as necessary, as the company had “a negative cash flow situation of $3 billion a year. Not good. Since Twitter has 1 billion in cash. So that’s why I spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy.
“This company is like, basically, you’re in a plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work,” Musk explained.
