For two hours yesterday, Twitter experienced a global outage, with most users unable to refresh or, in some cases, even load their timeline feeds. Neither the Twitter website nor the Twitter iPhone app were operational.
The Following and For you feeds – which display tweets on the platform’s homepage – instead carried a notice reading “Welcome to Twitter”. The problems were reported by the outage-tracking website DownDetector at 10:00 GMT, but they appeared to be resolved by 12:00. Users were able to send tweets, but many times only the author could see them because timelines were unavailable. Twitter Search was also inoperable.
It is unclear what is causing the outage, but Twitter cut 10% of its remaining workforce in its fourth round of layoffs over the weekend. According to reports, the layoffs affected several departments, including advertising and infrastructure engineering, leaving the company with fewer than 2,000 employees. When Elon Musk took over, it had about 7,500 employees.
Within half an hour of the fault appearing, over 5,000 people in the UK alone reported problems to DownDetector, with many more affected globally.
The For you feed, which collects tweets from people similar to those they follow, appeared to be restored within an hour of the initial issue, but the Following feed, which collects tweets from people users follow on Twitter, took longer to be restored. The site’s search tool is also back up and running after briefly failing to display any tweets in the Latest tab.
The sources for this piece include an article in BBC.
