Twitter appears to be back up and running after suffering an outrage in the early morning hours on Wednesday that left users unable to see new tweets in their feeds.
Earlier, when users logged on to the platform, they reported seeing a message saying, “Welcome to Twitter!” According to Downdetector, an outage monitoring service, users began to report problems with Twitter at about 9 p.m. AEDT. By 12 a.m. AEDT, Twitter appeared to be fixed, proceeding to become a meme on the social media network with people making wild declarations and stating “Welcome to Twitter.”
Welcome to Twitter where people are either utterly braindead or incredibly ahead of the game.
It’s a sandbox. go explore.
— BabyBlueSky (@RippleyRippley) March 1, 2023
The outage generated a torrent of confusion before becoming a meme. 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 were trending in the U.S. (the former still is). Clicking on the trend let you see a couple of new tweets about Twitter being down, but suddenly stopped after displaying about 20.
Some users blamed Twitter CEO Elon Musk vicious layoffs 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.
what do you mean “welcome to twitter” I’ve on this hellsite since 2010 pic.twitter.com/IGwN2npSjj
— You shine like the stars, You light up my heart (@assasyngal) March 1, 2023
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.
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.
Anyone else think that Musk asked the engineers 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.
Update 2/3/2023, 2:03 a.m. AEDT: This post has been updated to reflect that Twitter appears to be working again.