Twitter appears to be working as normal for most users following massive outages that hit the social media platform today (Wednesday 1 March) as thousands of users’ feeds were affected. According to Down Detector – a site which tracks website outages – the first major spike in reports of potential problems with Twitter appeared at around 10am on Wednesday morning.
Having hit more than 5,000 reports of around 10.45am, reports dropped on Down Detector dropped to below 1,000 by early afternoon today, suggesting that the bug is being fixed.
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Logging into the app or web browser this morning, existing users were met with a welcome message as if they were new to the site. The message read: “Welcome to Twitter! This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now.”
During the outage, instead of the regular Twitter timeline loading, with content from profiles that users follow, or from suggested posts, users could only click the ‘let’s go’ button which brought up a list of suggested profiles to follow.
It was unclear what had caused the outage of the page, and the rest of Twitter appeared to still be working as usual. Users can still see Twitter lists, and the new “for you” section that the site unveiled after Elon Musk took over last year.
The ability to send tweets and view your own profile does not seem to have been affected, but many users will be unable to view these tweets as they will not load in their timeline.
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It appears that users can still view tweets from people they follow by searching for their profiles individually in the search bar, though there have been reports that this function is today working unreliably.
The explore section also seems to be working - which ironically means that users can see the #TwitterDown and ‘Welcome to Twitter’ trending tweets.
The outage comes days after Twitter CEO Elon Musk (who promised to step down from the role following a Twitter poll he shared in December) reportedly fired roughly 200 employees from the company. Musk initially fired about half the Twitter workforce (around 3,750 people) within days of taking over the platform last year.
A New York Times report stated that Musk laid off at least 200 staff on Saturday 25 February as he continues to reduce overheads at the company which he purchased for roughly $44 billion in October last year.