Thousands of people around the world were unable to use Twitter for two hours on Wednesday after the social network suffered another outage.
The Following and For you feeds – which display tweets on the platform’s homepage – instead carried a notice reading « Welcome to Twitter ».
The outage-tracking site DownDetector reported the issues at 10:00 GMT, but they appeared to be resolved by 12:00.
It came after Twitter reportedly laid off 200 staff members on Monday.
More than 5,000 people in the UK alone reported problems to DownDetector within half an hour of the fault appearing, with many more affected worldwide.
The For you feed, a collection of tweets from people similar to those they follow, seemed to be reinstated just an hour after the initial issue emerged, but the Following feed, which collects tweets from people who users are following on Twitter, took longer to be fixed.
The site’s search tool is also working again, after it briefly stopped displaying any tweets in the Latest tab.
Increase in outages
It is unclear whether the latest outage was linked to the recent staff cuts, with the New York Times reporting the tech giant had cut 10% of its current 2000-strong workforce this week alone.
The cuts are the latest round of job losses at Twitter since chief executive Elon Musk sacked nearly half of the company’s 7,500 employees when he took over the company in October 2022.
Experts have warned major job cuts could trigger technical issues.
Alp Toker, director of internet outage tracker NetBlocks, said Twitter’s reliability issues have increased under Mr Musk’s tenure as CEO.
« It started shortly before the Musk takeover itself, » he said, but added: « The main spike has happened after the takeover, with four to five incidents in a month – which was comparable to what used to happen in a year. »
Mr Toker said he believed recent outages were « avoidable » and the « vast majority » could be traced back to problems with Twitter’s data centre.
He described the Twitter data centre as a « complex network » whose ongoing maintenance was essential to keeping the site running.
ECOSYSTEM
Positive growth.
Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.
Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put.
