Twitter services restored after widespread morning outage

Service on Twitter has been restored following a widespread outage spanning roughly two hours early Wednesday.

Twitter users reported problems with the site, with some saying their timelines were no longer uploading while they could still post tweets and view individual accounts.

Tweets on the platform’s “For you” and “Following” pages did not load. And users said they received a “Welcome to Twitter” message, something usually shared with new joiners who do not yet follow others.

According to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages on major platforms, users began noting the website was down at around 5 a.m. EST, with more than 3,700 outage reports logged by 5.30 a.m.

Over the weekend, Twitter laid off around 200 employees in a new round of cuts, roughly 10% of its remaining staff, after CEO Elon Musk sacked around half of the company’s 7,500 employees when he took over in October 2022.

Among those reportedly affected by the cuts was Esther Crawford, the company’s head of product, whose tweet about spending the night in a sleeping bag at Twitter HQ last year went viral.

• Twitter outages have been on the rise since Musk’s takeover of the company, and February saw at least four major outages, The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, several engineers tasked with keeping the site functional were impacted by the most recent wave of layoffs.