Twitter down: Site hit by outage after Elon Musk lays off more staff

Elon Musk took over Twitter in October. Credit: PA

Twitter users have complained after the site faced a major outage, just days after the company’s most recent round of staff layoffs.

Some long-term users to the social media site found they could no longer see any posts on their feeds - and instead said they have appeared to have had their Twitter wiped.

According to Down Detector, which tracks website outages, the first major spike in reports of potential problems with Twitter appeared at around 10am on Wednesday morning.

When Twitter users tried to navigate to that part of the site they were met with a message reading: “Welcome to Twitter! This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now.”

It was unclear what had caused the outage, and the rest of Twitter's functions appeared to still be working as usual.

Users can still see Twitter lists, and the new “for you” section that the site unveiled after Elon Musk took over last year.

Many were still able to tweet on the site which allowed the #TwitterDown to become the top trending phrase in the UK.

The outage came after Twitter laid off as many as 200 more employees over the weekend, according to reports.

The cuts are said to have hit product managers, data scientists and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability, which helps keep Twitter’s various features online, according to the New York Times.

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The social media platform now has a workforce of less than 2,000, down from 7,500 when Musk took it over in October.

There was no indication that the outage was related to the latest reported round of sackings. But it comes at a time when Twitter’s core teams are now reported to be operating with many fewer staff members.

The new layoffs came a week after the company reportedly made it difficult for employees to communicate with each other onliine.

Twitter's internal messaging service, Slack, was taken offline, preventing employees from chatting with each other or looking up company data.

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