On the morning of January 3,Twitchsuffered a major, site-wide outage that affected both streamers and regular users across the world. The outage was reported en masse by users on social media, andTwitchworked quickly to address the issues with the site’s interface immediately after user reports came in.The news came as the Amazon-owned streaming service tried to recover from a troublesome 2022. Between numerous controversies surrounding streamers, to changes made to how the site paid creators across the board, Twitch has not had the best of times. However, as Twitch prepares to improve the experience, it announcedchanges to how ads would be experiencedby the site’s viewership, with plans to make ads less intrusive for viewers on desktop browsers. That said, those ads could not function when the site outage occurred.RELATED:Man Arrested After Chasing IRL Twitch StreamerJust after 10:00 AM PST, the site outage reports started coming in on the Twitch Support Twitter feed. Users reported that follower lists, the ability to watch and broadcast, and various user interface features on desktop and mobile browsers were not showing correctly. Users also reported that they could not log into their accounts, and some feared that they werebanned from Twitch for no reason. 20 minutes later, Twitch Support sent out a tweet acknowledging the issues. At 10:44 AM PST, the outage was also acknowledged on the Twitch Status website, with site engineers working to quickly address the situation.
By 11:36 AM PST, Twitch Support tweeted that the site’s issues were mostly fixed, with a few outstanding issues remaining to be cleaned up, and encouraged users to refresh their browser tabs and restart mobile apps for these fixes to take effect. Aftera big viewership drop across Twitchin the closing months of 2022, which was not helped by a troublesome TwitchCon last October, the site’s outage could not have come at a worse time in the eyes of viewers. However, users thanked Twitch for its swift response to this outage, despite some login issues still persisting at the time of writing.
The outage occurred around the time that users also reported losing Twitch Drops fromEscape from Tarkov.By the same token, some users also reported they were able to make progress on the drops while the outage took place. Twitch has yet to comment on that particular issue at the time of writing. WhileBattlestate Games received a Twitch bandespite its work onEscape from Tarkov, the irony was not lost on viewers and players. Only time will tell if that ban will last long.
