Twitter suffers second outage in a week
Twitter users have reported login and loading problems for the second time in a week as its owner Elon Musk attempts to cut costs at the troubled platform and searches for a successor to lead it.
Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, reported thousands of complaints from Australians beginning at about 6am AEDT though the total size of the outage and its cause is unknown. “User reports indicate possible problems at Twitter,” Downdetector reported.
Twitter remains online, with the outage a popular topic among Australian users that managed to access the site. Some described initially being unable to login, while others encountered lengthy loading times or tweets that would not appear. Some users attempting to load tweets were met with a message reading: “Uh oh, an error was encountered”.
It comes after the social media site suffered a partial outage on Thursday, when users had problems with notifications, video and logging in to the service.
Musk finalised his $US44 billion ($65 billion) purchase of Twitter in October through a deal that saddled the company with billions in debt, requiring hefty interest payments. He fired thousands of staff and disconnected company servers, “cutting costs like crazy”, as Musk put it to an online forum in late December. Twitter was losing money even before Musk’s acquisition.
A day before Christmas, Musk said on Twitter that he had disconnected one of the company’s “more sensitive” server racks and likened its infrastructure to a “fractal of Rube Goldberg machines”.
The Tesla chief executive’s management of Twitter has seen advertisers leave the platform, denting the company’s bottom line amid a broader advertising downturn triggered by a shaky global economy.
After promising to honour the results of a poll where he asked the platform’s users whether he should step down, Musk said he would relinquish the role of chief executive once he had found a replacement.
Twitter no longer has a media representative in Australia, and Musk has not commented on the issues.
On Wednesday, Twitter announced it was winding back some of its restrictions on political advertising in the US.
The move aligns with Musk’s search for more revenue for the company and his dislike of restrictions that he views as tantamount to censorship.
“We believe that cause based advertising can facilitate public conversation around important topics,” reads a post on Twitter’s corporate account, which was inaccessible to some Australian users due to the outage.
“Today, we’re relaxing our ads policy for cause-based ads in the US. We also plan to expand the political advertising we permit in the coming weeks.”
It is not clear when or if the changes will come to Australia.
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Source: Thanks smh.com