Australian Twitter Users Aim Ire At Elon Musk After Apparent Local Outage – Wednesday, users in Australia and New Zealand were unable to use Twitter for several hours, marking the second outage in the past few weeks. On Wednesday, at about 7:00 a.m. AEST, the website Downdetector received thousands of reports from users stating that the site’s load times were slow, they received error messages, or they were unable to access it at all.
“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.
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Using a virtual private network (VPN), some users were able to access the website normally via the United States. The issue appeared to be limited to customers in Australia and New Zealand. Twitter hadn’t acknowledged the issue at the time of publication. A news outlet in Australia attempted to obtain a comment from Twitter, but the company no longer has a communications team following Musk’s takeover. It follows an extensive global outage of the website’s desktop version at the end of December.
Musk tweeted at the time that the site was functioning well for him, that “major backend server architecture changes” had occurred, and that “Twitter should feel faster.” After Musk initially purchased the platform for US$44 billion and fired around fifty percent of workers and the majority of its contractors, there were fears that the loss of skilled staff would eventually result in outages.
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. 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.
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