Twitter suffered an outage during Rihanna's Super Bowl halftime show — its 2nd in a week — despite Elon Musk's directive to maximize stability

• Rihanna's Super Bowl halftime performance coincided with nearly 1,000 reports of a Twitter outage.
• It came just four days after "a massive outage" saw users left unable to tweet.
• That had prompted Elon Musk to tell Twitter staff to maximize stability ahead of Sunday's big event.

Twitter suffered another outage during Rihanna's Super Bowl halftime show Sunday, despite Elon Musk's efforts to make the platform as stable as possible.

Nearly 1,000 users reported on Downdetector that they were having problems with Twitter, peaking as the Super Bowl halftime show started around 8:30 p.m. ET. Reports returned to normal about half an hour later, as the third quarter began.

Some Twitter users were faced with the error message "Tweets aren't loading right now," according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the outage.

"Did Rihanna's perfect performance overwhelm Twitter?" tweeted Brian Stelter, formerly a media reporter at CNN and the New York Times. "All I'm seeing are 'tweets are not loading now' error messages," he added.

The Barbadian singer performed a 14-minute medley, including some of her biggest hits like "Umbrella" and "Diamonds," while at times suspended above the field on a platform.

The apparent outage came just four days after Wednesday's "massive" one left users unable to tweet. According to Platformer, that occurred because a Twitter employee accidentally deleted important data, and there was nobody left on the team responsible due to Musk's cost-cutting measures.

That episode prompted the CEO to email all Twitter staff, telling them to stop developing new features, "in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up," as first reported by Fortune.

But it looks like Rihanna's appearance was too much for Twitter, even while focusing on keeping it problem-free. Praise for the entertainment was combined with chatter about the revelation that Rihanna is pregnant with her second child.

Musk himself was also in attendance at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, pictured next to Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp magnate, as the Kansas City Chiefs defeated the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35.

The Twitter CEO was previously photographed at the World Cup final in November, sat next to the CEO of the Qatar Investment Authority, which helped fund his takeover of the social-media company. The platform did not suffer any outages then, despite a larger viewership and Musk's similar emphasis on keeping Twitter running.

Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.