Dec 28 Reuters Twitter Inc suffered a major outage on Wednesday, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the popular social media platform or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back online.

The incident is the social media site39;s first apparent widespread service disruption since billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter as CEO in late October.

Downdetector, a website that tracks outages through a range of sources including user reports, showed more than 10,000 affected users from the United States, about 2,500 from Japan and about 2,500 from the UK at the peak of the disruption.

Most of the reports came from users stating they faced technical issues accessing the social network via web browser.

Reports of Twitter outages fell sharply by Wednesday evening, according to the website, with some users later commenting service had returned to normal.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment and the social network39;s status page showed that all systems were operational.

Musk tweeted later on Wednesday that Significant backend server architecture changes had been rolled out and that Twitter should feel faster, but his post did not make any reference to the downtime reported by users.

During the outage, some users said they were unable to log in to their Twitter account via desktops or laptops. A smaller number of users said the issue also affected the mobile app and features including…