Twitter is not dead yet, it is just randomly logging out a number of its users. After it was reported earlier today that Twitter was suffering from a bug that was allowing people to edit their bios to briefly restore verified checkmarks, this afternoon the Twitter website began randomly logging users out. There are a number of complaints about the issue on Twitter itself, suggesting that at least some are able to return after booting from the site.
The issue appears to be affecting desktop users at the moment who are using Twitter over the web. Some claim they get logged out frequently.
We found that the problem occurs when you are browsing the Twitter website. The page refreshes and then Twitter users (including many of us here at TechCrunch) are taken to the default website for logged out users. This page displays a selection of Tweets and options to sign in with Google, Apple, or by creating a new account. Many people (tweeting on their phones, we think) say they are unable to get back to the site through any of the usual methods.
We’re also having this problem, after we got to the screen where we can enter the code from the code generator app. But after entering the code, the page just refreshes and takes us back to the same checkout page again.
The Downdetector website also shows a sharp increase in user complaints about the site, which indicates that the problem is somewhat widespread.
Twitter has not yet acknowledged the issue via its official Twitter or Twitter Support accounts.
The bug is another example of the growing list of issues that followed Elon Musk’s takeover of the social network and massive layoffs of engineering staff from the transition. Since then, Twitter has had a host of issues including glitches in the Twitter Circle that exposed private tweets to the public, broken timelines, broken links and images, maladaptive error messages, and experienced multiple outages. At the same time, the company is presenting itself to advertisers and creators, and suggests that its future will include becoming a supercharged app that also offers payments.
Over the weekend, in fact, Musk described how media publishers — a group he recently pushed aside by dubbing outlets like NPR and PBS “government funded” — would be able to offer micropayments for individual articles via Twitter. A similar concept is now being piloted by competitor Twitter Post.
However, it’s not clear that any of Twitter’s big plans will ever gain traction.
After all, it’s hard to sell much of anything on a site that users don’t have access to.