Twitter users are waking up and experiencing issues with the app and website this morning. Since roughly 5:11 AM ET/3:11 AM PT, Twitter has been undergoing issues impacting the use of the platform.
As first reported by 9to5Mac, DownDetector shows a drastic spike in reported issues starting in the early hours of the morning. The extent of the outage is still currently unknown. However, as of the time of writing, it does appear to be a global outage. Some users are reporting that while still being able to send a tweet on the app, they are the only ones capable of reading it. Others claim that the ‘Explore’ search bar isn’t working.
However, the outage isn’t just restricted to the mobile app. At this current time, it appears as though 59 percent of the reports are stemming from the iOS and Android apps. However, 35 percent are coming from reported issues with the website. The remaining five percent is attributed to server connections.
The way DownDetector works is that it establishes a baseline when a reported outage appears. It then utilizes user-based reports to better establish where and how the outage affected the app, website, or platform. As of now, there have been 1,000s of user reports this morning.
However, there still does not appear to be any known cause for why Twitter would be down at the moment. Unfortunately, outages are becoming more common recently. It was only a couple of weeks ago when Twitter experienced issues once again when the platform announced its plans to introduce 4,000-character tweet lengths.
One cause for concern is Twitter’s continual layoff of staff. Since Elon Musk’s takeover, the company has seen upwards of over half its staff laid off. Late last year, a mass exodus happened at the company. Over the months, Twitter’s staff has dwindled from 7,500 down to roughly 2,000. This past weekend, Twitter did a fourth round of layoffs. While this may not be a direct cause of today’s outage, fewer engineers on staff are undoubtedly affecting the stability of the website and app.
