Outage: Over 368m Tweeter Users Unable To Tweet

Microblogging site, Twitter, went down on Wednesday as over 368 million monthly active users worldwide were unable access the service, according to Downdetector.com, a platform that monitors outages.

This came after Twitter laid off 200 staff members, as part of its latest round of job cuts.

According to the report by New York Times, the job cuts took place Saturday night and impacted product managers, data scientists and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability. The team helped keep Twitter’s various features online.

The number of outages reported for the social media site on Downdetector spiked around 3:30 pm IST and grew rapidly for about an hour.

At first, users were able to tweet, and search for other profiles and tweets on the platform, but the timeline on the homepage was not visible for most people.

Users could see the following message on the homepage instead of their feed: “Welcome to Twitter. This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now.”

Soon after the outage, #TwitterDown started trending on the microblogging site, with users reporting outages and posting screenshots of the message displayed on the homepage.

“Is twitter down again? This is what my usually vibrant timeline looks like now. (If it is down, it’s fairly pointless posting this, I realise),” one user wrote in a tweet with a screenshot of the homepage.

This was not the first time the social media platform has reported an outage in recent times.

There have been several intermittent outages in recent months, with a temporary outage in early February seeing some users told they were over the daily limit for sending tweets.

Meanwhile, Twitter CEO, Elon Musk, was yet to give an official statement on the outage.