Twitter timelines shut down for 3 hours in temporary site-wide outage

Twitter users were unable to access their “for you” and “following” timelines for several hours Wednesday morning as part of a site-wide outage.

According to reports, a spike in outage reports started flowing in at around 5 a.m. Wednesday and tapered off close to 8 a.m. The site has been working normally since then.

The cause of the crash has not been confirmed by Twitter officials.

Since Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk took over the company last year and fired over 5,000 employees, Twitter has experienced a wealth of issues.

In February, Twitter experienced at least four site-wide outages like the one that happened Wednesday. The site saw smaller issues as well over the past few months, including tweets not loading correctly and users unable to tweet at all. Users also reported in early February that the personal messaging system on Twitter was not working.

Despite many of these bugs or outages being fixed relatively quickly, current and former employees say the lack of staff will make glitches more frequent and take longer to resolve.

As part of a massive restructuring effort by Mr. Musk, a Twitter data center in Sacramento, California, which dealt with much of Twitter’s web traffic, was shuttered. Four days later, a massive Twitter outage left users logged out or unable to view replies to their tweets.

Communication between employees at Twitter has also become increasingly complicated. According to reports, in mid-February Twitter employees lost access to Slack, a popular platform for intracompany communication, for a weekend. Their access was restored Monday, but many of their channels were archived and unavailable.