Maxis Fibre users can’t load Twitter but this could be a bigger problem

[ UPDATE 23/4/2020 20:15 ] Maxis has announced that the slow loading issue has been resolved. Below is their official statement:

We have identified the root cause of the recent fibre issue experienced by some of our customers, which was due to our partner’s submarine cable. We are pleased to inform that the service has since been restored. We apologise for the inconvenience.

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It appears that Maxis Fibre broadband users are having trouble accessing Twitter via web browser since Sunday. The problem seems to be limited to Maxis Fibre users and it doesn’t affect those on mobile postpaid plans.

As a Maxis Fibre user myself, Twitter on web browser was noticeably slow on Sunday and Monday, but it returned to normal on Tuesday after restarting the wireless router. However, the slow loading issue came back again on Wednesday but it’s back to normal today.

When the problem occurred, the Twitter website layout could load but it could take more than 15 seconds for the feed, search results and the trending widget to appear. Sometimes, it just refuses to load at all and new tweets wouldn’t go through.

Maxis is aware of the issue and they are currently trying to solve the problem. From the tweets on social media, it appears that Maxis Fibre users are also facing issues connecting to game services including PlayStation Network, Ubisoft, Epic Games and Steam.

According to DownDetector, there were outages reported for Twitter in the past few days. Users have complained that Twitter hasn’t been loading properly for several days and if you look at the heatmap, most of the complaints come from the US and Europe.

Initially, we suspected that the slow loading issue could be caused by the AAG submarine cable which connects service providers in the region to Hong Kong and the United States. However, the maintenance works were completed on Tuesday morning. Two weeks ago, another submarine cable had suffered a fault but service providers such as TM have rerouted traffic via alternative routes. On top of that, based on DownDetector, there are more complaints about Twitter coming from other regions outside of Asia.

However, it seems that users can currently overcome the issue by changing the DNS on their device. You could use either use Google DNS or Cloudflare. From our initial checks, although a significant number of Maxis fibre users are affected, there are users on Digi and Time broadband that have reported slow Twitter issues as well.

Are you still having issues loading Twitter on the desktop browser? Let us know in the comments below.