Twitter hit by huge outage after latest round of firings from Elon Musk

Twitter has been hit by a major outage, soon after the company’s most recent round of layoffs.

Visitors to the site saw what appeared to be a welcome page, as if they did not follow anyone on the site. It encouraged them to click through and find their first people to follow.

“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.”

A similar message appeared on the app version of Twitter, with a button reading “Let’s go” that took users to a list of suggested users.

But there was no way to get around that initial message, leaving users unable to see the feed or any posts from the people they do actually already follow.

It was however possible to see a specific user’s tweets by heading to their account page, which appeared to be loading as normal.

Twitter’s search feature also appeared to be working, though unreliably.

And users were able to post new tweets – even as there was no feed to actually view them in.

The outage came after Twitter fired as many as 200 more employees over the weekend, according to reports. Those layoffs followed successive round of cuts that had already left the company with less than 75 per cent of the employees it had when Elon Musk took over the company.

There was no indication that the outage was related to the firings, though many of Twitter’s core teams are now understood to be operating with much fewer staff members.