Topline
Twitter was hit by an outage Wednesday morning that prevented users across the world from accessing their timelines—it appears to be the latest in a series of technical glitches that have marred the website over the past few months, after owner Elon Musk laid off thousands of staffers.
The Twitter logo is seen on the awning of the building that houses the Twitter office in New York.
Key Facts
Users logging into Twitter on their computer’s browser are being greeted with a blank timeline that reads “Welcome to Twitter!”, a message usually reserved for new signups.
Twitter’s mobile app also appears to be impacted by the outage as it fails to load recent tweets.
The outage appears to impact users’ timelines as of 6:45 a.m. ET, as individual accounts can still be accessed and the tweets can still be read.
According to Downdetector, the outage appears to have started at around 5 a.m. ET.
The Twitter Support account has not commented on the outage, neither has CEO Musk.
News Peg
Wednesday’s outage is the latest in a series of technical glitches that have affected the site in the past few months. A major glitch on February 8 prevented some users from making new posts, informing them they had gone over “the daily limit for sending tweets.” The site was hit by another major outage back in December, which prevented some users from logging in or posting new tweets. These technical glitches have become more frequent as Musk has attempted to dramatically reduce costs at the company by cutting off several internal services and laying off key staffers. Last week, the Platformer reported the company had shut access to the internal communication app Slack, while development tool Jira also stopped working. The report added Twitter’s service has seen significant degradation—including slower load times and technical glitches—ever since it shut down one of its three main data centers in December. The New York Times, citing Twitter employees, reported that Musk has slashed several teams that work on the company’s back-end technology, including its servers and cloud systems. This has been a serious blow to the company’s ability to deal with problems and outages as many of the fired workers possessed the “institutional knowledge” needed to deal with such problems.
Key Background
Over the weekend, Twitter laid off more than 200 staffers, including some top engineers who had risen up the ranks following Musk’s takeover of the company and were seen as loyal to him. The latest layoffs mean Twitter’s overall headcount has dropped from 7,500 when Musk took over, to around 1,800 workers.
Further Reading
New cracks emerge in Elon Musk’s Twitter (Platformer)
‘Sometimes Things Break’: Twitter Outages Are on the Rise (New York Times)
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/03/01/twitter-outage-users-report-theyre-unable-to-access-timeline-in-latest-interruption/