Twitter hit by huge outage after latest round of firings from Elon Musk

Outage comes days after new CEO fired hundreds more staff

Andrew Griffin
Wednesday 01 March 2023 07:51 EST
Comments
Twitter Slashes 10% Of Workforce in Latest Round of Job Cuts

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

Twitter has been hit by a major outage, soon after the company’s most recent round of layoffs.

Visitors to the site saw what appeared to be a welcome page, as if they did not follow anyone on the site. It encouraged them to click through and find their first people to follow.

“Welcome to Twitter!” the message read. “This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now.”

A similar message appeared on the app version of Twitter, with a button reading “Let’s go” that took users to a list of suggested users.

But there was no way to get around that initial message, leaving users unable to see the feed or any posts from the people they do actually already follow.

It was however possible to see a specific user’s tweets by heading to their account page, which appeared to be loading as normal.

Twitter’s search feature also appeared to be working, though unreliably.

And users were able to post new tweets – even as there was no feed to actually view them in.

The outage came after Twitter fired as many as 200 more employees over the weekend, according to reports. Those layoffs followed successive round of cuts that had already left the company with less than 75 per cent of the employees it had when Elon Musk took over the company.

There was no indication that the outage was related to the firings, though many of Twitter’s core teams are now understood to be operating with much fewer staff members.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in