Twitter was unavailable to users around the world for more than an hour on Wednesday morning, the latest in a series of technical difficulties the site has suffered since Elon Musk took over.
As of 10:20am UK time, visitors to twitter.com were greeted with error messages. Although the full outage was quickly fixed, the site was down until late in the afternoon, and users were unable to access their “home” feed, despite notifications, profile views, and direct messages still working.
Unusually, users were still able to post to the site during the outage, and “trending topics” continued to update, leading to trends including “#TwitterDown“, “My Twitter” and “Welcome to Twitter”. The “For You” feed, which features an algorithmic collection of the top tweets across the site, was restored before the home feed.
Since taking over the company in November, new owner and CEO Elon Musk has launched at least eight waves of punitive layoffs, reducing the workforce from 7,500 before it started to fewer than 2,000 people. Reports from within the company have described “critical” teams having been laid off entirely, with hastily promoted replacements struggling to pick up where their colleagues left off.
For the rest of the staff, communication has also been hampered by other cost-cutting decisions. Twitter stopped paying rent at locations around the world, reversing Musk’s initial push to force all staff back into the office, while an unannounced shakeup of his internal communication platform, Slack, saw employees completely disconnected for more than a day, until access. it was restored with over 80,000 pre-existing channels archived.
In November, after the second wave of layoffs, sparked by Musk’s demand that workers sign a commitment to an “extremely hard” way of working, the CEO assured viewers that Twitter would not shut down due to a lack of staff, saying that “the best people stay, so I’m not super worried.”
Despite that, site outages have become increasingly common. According to NetBlocks, Wednesday’s outage is Twitter’s fifth this year, already putting the platform halfway to surpassing its 2022 total.
