Twitter has reported a major outage due to engineers upgrading the system to make sure new owner Elon Musk’s tweets were visible to users on the social media site.
A spike in issues was reported at 11pm on Monday, according to the website Downdetector, with many users waking up on Tuesday to find they were limited to viewing Musk’s tweets, replies and some adverts.
Musk earlier commented that his tweets were not being delivered to users on its new 'for you' feed.
The Tesla chief executive suggested Twitter’s engineering team had suffered a “long day” on Sunday, as they worked to fix issues preventing his posts from reaching users.
The “fanout service for following feed was getting overloaded” when Musk tweeted, he wrote in a post, meaning 95% of what he sent out was not being delivered.
He added a glitch with the site’s recommendation algorithm also led to many highly followed accounts being blocked mistakenly.
Fixing the recommendation algorithm is our current top priority. Twitter engineering has been working super hard on this. Proud of the team.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 13, 2023
Twitter has been plagued by problems recently, including tweeters being shown error messages last week suggesting they had surpassed a 4,200 daily post limit.
Musk has cut the social media company’s workforce drastically since his US$44bn October takeover, reducing its headcount by 8,000 to 2,300 staff, while looking to implement a host of new features – including the new ‘for you’ feed which recommends posts to users.