On March 1, Twitter encountered a glitch resulting in several users having trouble accessing Elon Musk‘s social networking site. Coincidentally, Jack Dorsey’s new start-up Bluesky entered the beta testing phase during the same period.
Downdetector data revealed that Twitter users reported thousands of problems at 9 a.m. UTC, with faults steadily being fixed over five hours. 59% of reported issues originated from mobile app users, while 35% of reported issues originated from website users.
Twitter has not yet provided information on the cause of the outage. Still, many reports indicate that users worldwide encountered troubles, including the “Following” and “For You” feeds not displaying any tweets or content.
Reports claimed the corporation laid off 200 workers over the weekend. After Musk took over Twitter, the number of employees decreased from over 7,500 to less than 2,000. According to the report, the corporation laid off product managers, data scientists, and engineers.
While Twitter dealt with its most recent outage, Bluesky, Dorsey’s decentralized social media network, entered private beta testing. The smartphone application became accessible to select users via an invitation-only beta test.
Initial reports suggest that the application has been downloaded over 2,000 times from the Apple App Store since it became available on February 17. However, the app is currently unavailable on Android.
A January report stated that Twitter was developing payment functions for the service, with the possibility of incorporating cryptocurrency capabilities in the future. In January, the social media app also released a cryptocurrency price search function that included more than 30 different tokens.
Bluesky launched as a Twitter affiliate in 2019 with the intention of establishing an open and decentralized social media standard. Similarly, Damus, a decentralized social media platform, started operationally in February 2023. The platform is a messaging service powered by Nostr, a decentralized network that enables end-to-end encrypted private messaging and other services.
