#Twitterdown - Top Site's Fifth Outage This Year

By Hope H

After Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter this October, things haven’t been going well for the platform. This Wednesday, they were hit by another outage, with thousands of people worldwide unable to use the site. This outage marks one of a series for the platform, but what happened, and why? Read on to find out!

Troubles ahead

The problems started at 10:00 GMT, with thousands of reports on sites such as Downdetector indicating that the site was facing severe problems. Many tweeters received a ‘welcome to twitter’ message upon opening the app, with others receiving error messages or were unable to refresh their feeds. Twitter’s ‘for you’ feed, a collection of tweets collated by an algorithm to suit your possible interests, appeared to be reinstated shortly after the issue was detected; however, the ‘following’ feed took longer to be fixed, with many users still reporting errors hours later.

Welcome to Twitter!

Outages are nothing new to Twitter, particularly since Musk’s website takeover. However, during this outage, users were reportedly able to tweet messages and view the ‘trending topics’ tab, leading to trends such as ‘#twitterdown’, ‘MyTwitter’ and ‘Welcome to twitter’ registering as top trends across the platform.

Staff cuts; are Elon’s layoffs the root cause?

The reliability of Twitter has deteriorated since Musk’s takeover, with four outages this February alone, compared to nine outages seen by the platform in the entirety of 2022. The cause of the latest outage is still unclear; however, many had speculated that it comes after Musk’s latest staff cutdown, which left Twitter with only 2000 employees, less than a third of the 7500 it had when Musk took over in October. The latest layoffs reportedly affected dozens of engineers responsible for keeping the site online, which many have cited as the probable reason behind this week’s outage.

Though the company is unlikely to collapse entirely, the recent outages, described by internet outage tracker Netblock’s director as ‘avoidable’, seem to be on the rise, and twitters future appears to be more precarious than ever.