Are you having problems accessing Twitter today? You’re not alone. I’ve been having several different issues as of Saturday morning. According to Down Detector, other users started reporting problems around 9:00 a.m. ET that have continued into the afternoon.
The issues seem to be different depending on what platform you’re using. On the Twitter mobile app, I’ve been receiving a message that I simply can’t load tweets. On the desktop site, I’m seeing the same notice that new users get when they first join Twitter.
The notice on desktop reads, “This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now,” despite the fact that I follow over 4,000 accounts.
Twitter has struggled with keeping its website up in recent weeks, due in part to changes that have been reportedly made to the social media platform. Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, even instituted a new rule on July 1 that limited the number of tweets that most users could read to just 600. And while that number has been revised upward, it still upset quite a few users. The Atlantic compared it to Costco instituting a 12-item limit on the number of things shoppers could buy in a single trip.
Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 and immediately instituted a number of controversial changes, including his decision to fire thousands of workers. Musk also welcomed back to Twitter several people who had previously been banned for hate speech.
Musk recently hired Linda Yaccarino from NBCUniversal in a bid to calm advertisers who had grown nervous about Musk’s changes at the company, starting as CEO in early June, though she was oddly quiet over Independence Day weekend, when Twitter started its rate limiting experiment. There are real questions about how much control Musk has actually relinquished at the company.
More recently, Musk has vowed to fight a cage match with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, apparently instigated because Musk didn’t like that Meta has launched a competitor to Twitter called Threads. And Musk, who’s 52 years old, took the rivalry even further when he suggested the two billionaires have a literal dick measuring contest. It’s not wonder then that Musk reported yesterday ad revenue is down roughly 50%.
Twitter responded to questions emailed on Saturday afternoon with a poop emoji, an automated response set up back in March by the Musk. I’ll update this article if I hear back.
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