Twitter was unavailable for users around the world for over an hour on Wednesday morning, the latest in a spate of technical difficulties suffered by the site since its takeover by Elon Musk.
Beginning at about 10:20am UK time, visitors to Twitter.com were greeted with error messages. Although the total outage was rapidly fixed, the site remained in effect nonfunctional until well into the afternoon, with users unable to access their “home” feed, despite notifications, profile visits and direct messages still working.
Unusually, users could still post to the site throughout the outage, and the “trending topics” continued to refresh, leading to trends including “#TwitterDown“, “My Twitter” and “Welcome to Twitter”. The “For You” feed, which presents an algorithmic collection of the top tweets across the site, was restored before the home feed.
Since taking over the business in November, new owner and chief executive Elon Musk has launched at least eight waves of punishing layoffs, reducing the headcount from 7,500 before he started to fewer than 2,000 people. Reports from inside the business have described “critical” teams being laid off in their entirety, with hurriedly promoted replacements struggling to pick up where their departed colleagues left off.
For the remaining staff, communication has also been hampered by other cost-cutting decisions. Twitter has stopped paying rent in locations around the world, reversing Musk’s initial push to force all staff to return to the office, while an unannounced reorganisation of its internal communication platform, Slack, saw employees cut off entirely for more than a day, until access was restored with more than 80,000 pre-existing channels archived.
In November, after the second wave of layoffs – prompted by Musk’s demand that workers sign a pledge to an “extremely hardcore” mode of working – the chief executive reassured onlookers that Twitter would not shut down because of the lack of staff, saying “the best people are staying, so I’m not super worried”.
Despite that, outages at the site have become an increasingly common occurrence. According to NetBlocks, Wednesday’s outage is Twitter’s fifth this year, already putting the platform over halfway towards topping its 2022 total.
