Twitter hit by worldwide outage with thousands of users unable to load new tweets
1 March 2023, 11:59 | Updated: 1 March 2023, 13:54
Twitter was hit by a massive outage on Wednesday, with thousands of users reporting they were unable to see new tweets on their homepage.
Users logging onto Twitter online and on mobile apps were taken to a new 'Welcome to Twitter' page, meaning they were unable to load their timeline.
“Welcome to Twitter!” the message read. “This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now.”
There was no way to get around the message, while users searching specific terms were also unable to see latest tweets.
According to Down Detector, Twitter's issues started at 10:17 GMT (05:17 ET) and affected thousands of users across the world.
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According to NetBlocks, today's outage was Twitter’s fifth so far this year, more than half of Twitter's 2022 total.
It comes after Twitter CEO Elon Musk sacked a high-profile executive who bragged about sleeping at the office as part of the latest round of departures from the social media giant.
Esther Crawford, who was head of Twitter Payments, was in charge of Musk's flagship plan to get users to pay for a verified "blue tick" before Musk fired her today.
She made headlines last year after she posted a picture of her sleeping at Twitter HQ as part of Musk's attempts to create a "heavy metal" working culture at the micro-blogging site.
Crawford joined the company in December 2020 and her sacking is the most high-profile of the 200 which occurred over the weekend.
Musk posted a cryptic nod to the removals, calling Sunday "the first day of the rest of [their lives]".
In a post after her departure, Crawford wrote: "The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake.
"Those who jeer & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos".
