Twitter is down for thousands of users this morning. When users log in, they see a message that says “Welcome to Twitter!” but are unable to see new posts or post tweets.
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According to Downdetector, an outage monitoring service, users began to report problems with Twitter at about 5 a.m. ET. When I first logged on, I thought Twitter had somehow erased all of the people I was following, but quickly learned that was not so when I went to my profile. Some of my Twitter lists worked and showed me new tweets, but others simply showed the same “Welcome to Twitter!” message in the main “For You” feed.
Twitter’s trending sidebar seemed to still be intact and showed that “Welcome to Twitter” and #TwitterDown was trending in the U.S. Clicking on the trend lets you see a couple of new tweets about Twitter being down, but suddenly stops after about 20.
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Some users blamed Twitter CEO Elon Musk and his vicious and nonsensical budget cuts for the outage, while others simply wanted to know what was going on. One Twitter user summed up the situation perfectly:
“what do you mean “welcome to twitter” I’ve on this hellsite since 2010,” @assasyngal wrote. Which, honestly, same.
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Although the main feed was messed up, you could still kind of use Twitter by navigating manually through the search bar or checking your notifications to see if anyone had responded to you. Despite the inconvenience, this incident highlights just how much people depend on the main Twitter feed to use the app.
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One possible theory for the outage could be Musk’s insistence that people use Twitter lists more. The billionaire has repeatedly reminded people that using lists improves their experience. He did so yesterday again.
“Periodic reminder to try using Twitter Lists. Will greatly improve your experience,” Musk tweeted.
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Anyone else think that Musk asked who is left at Twitter to do something to encourage people to use lists and ended up with this? I’d sure bet a coffee on that.
Twitter no longer has a communications department to email for comment.
This story is developing.
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