Twitter has crashed this morning, leaving thousands of frustrated users unable to see tweets in their feeds.
According to Down Detector, a website which monitors such outages, the issues started at 10:17 GMT (05:17 ET) and are affecting users worldwide.
The reason for the outage remains unclear, although more than 5,000 issues have now been logged on Down Detector.
Of those who reported issues, 62 per cent said they were having problems with the app, 34 per cent with the website and four per cent with the server connection.
It comes just days after Twitter laid off another 200 employees, around 10 per cent of its remaining workforce, in the latest round of job cuts since Elon Musk took over last October.
The layoffs, announced on Saturday, brought Twitter’s workforce down to under 2,000 — a sharp fall from the 7,500 employed when the billionaire first took over.
On Sunday, Musk Tweeted: ‘Hope you have a good Sunday. First day of the rest of your life.’
The outages have been increasing ever since Musk began running Twitter, leading to speculation that there aren’t enough people to fix its problems.
In February alone, the site experienced at least four widespread outages, compared with nine in all of 2022, according to NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages.
Bugs, including those that have prevented people from posting tweets, have also been more noticeable, researchers say.
In the past, Twitter prevented outages from escalating by having people around to diagnose and solve problems immediately, but there are now fewer engineers to tackle these issues.
Today, the majority of issues with Twitter in the UK were reported in major cities, including London, Belfast and Cardiff.
American users in cities such as New York, Washington and Boston also complained of having problems.
‘My Twitter’ and ‘Welcome to Twitter’ was trending on the site this morning, with people complaining that a bug meant they were being greeted with the message you receive when first signing up to the social media platform.
Users said there was no way to get around that initial message, leaving them unable to see their feed or any posts from the people they follow.
One user, Natalie Ann Grace, tweeted: ‘Well my twitter is broken, can’t see any posts unless they’re in my notifications, my feed is replaced with the “welcome to twitter” thing you get when you sign up.’
Another, David Ziggy Greene, added: ‘Can’t view timeline or any tweets because after 9 years twitter has decided to welcome me & won’t let me see anything else.’
Beth Hawks wrote: ‘Anyone else getting a “welcome to Twitter” message when they log on as though they’ve never been on it before?’
Many users reported having to access Twitter via Google as a workaround to view their feeds.
The site’s search tool appears to be partly working, although it does not display any tweets in the Latest tab.
Saturday’s job cuts targeted product managers, data scientists and engineers and include product manager and Musk devotee Esther Crawford who led the launch of paid subscription service Twitter Blue.
She famously backed Musk’s ‘extremely hardcore’ Twitter 2.0 culture when he first took over, and was pictured on the office floor in a sleeping bag with a sleeping mask in November 2022.
The layoffs impacted the largest number of people at the company since half the company was laid off in November last year.
Employees discovered they were set to lose their jobs after they found themselves unable to log in to their emails and work computers.
Musk told employees during a meeting in late November that no more plans for staff reductions were being made.
At the time, Musk defended the decision to fire 3,700 people, saying: ‘There is no choice when the company is losing over $4mn/day.’
Last month Twitter changed its Twitter Blue service for users in the US so they could post tweets with up to a whopping 4,000 characters.
However, a couple of hours later the company later said Twitter was not ‘working as expected’, before adding that it was trying to get the issue fixed.
It was unclear whether the significant update to the character limit caused the technical problem, which left some users unable to tweet or follow other accounts.
Musk later admitted: ‘Multiple internal and external issues simultaneously today. Should be fully back on track later tonight.’
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