On March 1, Twitter went down again after thousands of users pointed out problems with Elon Musk's social media platform. The outage came as Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's new project, Bluesky, entered beta testing.
Data from Downdetector shows thousands of reports of the problem from Twitter users starting at 9 a.m. UTC, and the issue was slowly resolved over a five-hour period. 59% of reported issues came from mobile app users, and another 35% were flagged by website users.
Twitter hasn't issued any updates on the cause of the outage, but various reports indicate that users in different parts of the world are experiencing issues, including "Following" and "For You" feeds not displaying any tweets or content. The New York Times reported that another 200 employees were laid off from the company over the weekend. Since Musk took over the social media platform, Twitter's headcount has shrunk from more than 7,500 to fewer than 2,000. Product managers, data scientists and engineers are reportedly among those fired from the company.
Dorsey's decentralized social media platform, Bluesky, entered private beta testing as Twitter grapples with the latest outage. As Cointelegraph reported, the mobile app is available to select users through an invite-only beta test. According to preliminary reports, the app has been available on the Apple App Store since February 17 and had more than 2,000 downloads by the end of the month. The app is not yet available on Android.
A report in January suggested that Twitter was developing a payments feature for the app, with the possibility of adding cryptocurrency functionality in the future. The social media app also launched a cryptocurrency price search feature in January, featuring more than 30 different coins.
Bluesky emerged as a Twitter spinoff in 2019 with the aim of creating an open and decentralized standard for social media. At the same time, Damus, another decentralized social media platform, will also go live in February 2023. The platform is a messaging service built on top of Nostr, a decentralized network that enables encrypted end-to-end private messaging and other services.
