Users on Twitter reported login and upload issues for the second time in a week, as owner Elon Musk attempts to slash costs on the struggling network and searches for a successor to manage it. There were thousands of complaints from Australians starting around 6 a.m. ET on Wednesday, although the overall size of the outage and its cause are unknown. User reports point to potential issues with Twitter.
Twitter is still operational, and the outage has become a hot topic among Australian users who have been able to access the service. Some reported being unable to log in at first, while others reported excessive loading times or tweets that did not appear. When some users attempted to download the tweets, they received the warning, “Oops, an error occurred.”
Musk tweeted the day before Christmas that he had shut down one of the company’s “most sensitive” server racks and compared the company’s infrastructure to “a Rube Goldberg machine fractal.” Twitter’s leadership, led by Tesla’s CEO, has seen advertisers quit the site, lowering the company’s profitability amid a wider advertising slump caused by global economic insecurity.
Musk said he would stand aside as CEO as soon as he identified a replacement, promising to consider the results of a poll in which he asked platform users if he should step down. Twitter announced on Wednesday that it was relaxing some of its rules on political advertising in the United States. The decision is consistent with Musk’s desire for more income for the company and his hatred of limits that he considers to be censorship.
“We believe that cause-based advertising can facilitate a 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 ad policy for cause-based ads in the US. “We also plan to expand the political advertising we permit in the coming weeks.”
