Twitter users were unable to view tweets in latest service disruption under Musk

CNN, CNN BUSINESS

By Clare Duffy, CNN

Twitter’s timeline page appeared to experience a prolonged outage on Wednesday morning, marking the latest service disruption for the platform under new owner Elon Musk.

Some Twitter users who opened up their “for you” timeline were greeted with a blank screen and a message saying, “welcome to your timeline,” encouraging them to follow other users to get tweets to show up even if they already followed various accounts. Other users were met with a “Welcome to Twitter!” message as if they had just joined the platform. The “following” page also failed to load.

There were more than 4,000 user reports of issues on DownDetector, an outage tracker, as of 5:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday. Within about two hours, the issue appeared to have largely resolved. #TwitterDown was trending on the platform Wednesday morning.

The outage marked the second major glitch the platform has experienced in less than a month. Three weeks ago, Twitter users encountered various issues with the platform, including the inability to tweet, send direct messages or follow new accounts.

Twitter has experienced a range of technical glitches since Musk took over the company and laid off more than half its staff late last year. Users have previously reported issues with the app’s two-factor authentication tool, seeing replies listed above a tweet rather than below it and seeing old tweets show up repeatedly in their feed or mentions.

Some former employees raised concerns that the mass layoffs under Musk could cause the platform to break in big or small ways, after workers with knowledge of Twitter’s key systems were ousted. But Musk has continued to cut staff in an effort to boost Twitter’s bottom line.

Wednesday’s service disruption comes after Twitter reportedly laid off another 10% of its staff earlier this week, including some engineers responsible for site reliability, according to a report from the New York Times.

It’s not clear what caused Wednesday’s apparent outage. Twitter, which eliminated much of its media relations staff last year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the issue.

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