Twitter outage hits India as several users report problems in big blow to Elon Musk

Twitter goes down in a big blow to Elon Musk. The microblogging platform faces outage in India.

Twitter goes down in India (AFP)

As the Twitter offices closes on Friday for a large-scale layoff, Twitter went down in for India users. On the morning of November 4, many Twitter users reported problems with the microblogging site stating they were unable to log into their accounts. The issue appears to be for the web version of the website. But the app seems to be working fine. A popup that reads "Something went wrong, but don't worry - try again" appears when the feed page first loads.

Many users reported this issue on the online outage monitor DownDetector. At its peak, there were more than 143 reports of this issue. It is not known why this issue occurred at present. The issue is still ongoing at the moment of writing this and about 92 fresh reports are popping up every minute.

Downdetector highlights the Twitter outage. (Downdetector)

Downdetector highlights the Twitter outage. (Downdetector)

Twitter goes down in India

"I'm unable to access Twitter and getting an error prompt...Something went wrong, but don't fret -- let's give it another shot.Try again," a social media user wrote.

Reportedly, the outage started around 3 am and saw a relatively big spike around 7 am.

Meanwhile, Twitter has been in news for other reasons as well, thanks to Elon Musk. Last week, he took control of Twitter and fired its top executives.

He has also started mass layoffs today. As per an unsigned internal memo seen by The Verge, Twitter employees were notified in the email that the layoffs were set to begin.

Employees will receive an email by 9AM PST on November 4 confirming whether they have been laid off or not, according to the internal memo, which also states that employee badge access to Twitter's offices will be shut off "temporarily."

"We acknowledge this is an incredibly challenging experience to go through, whether or not you are impacted," the memo read.

"Thank you for continuing to adhere to Twitter policies that prohibit you from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere," the memo added.

Musk is expected to cut roughly half of Twitter's roughly 7,500-person workforce.

Musk has already indicated that he would make job cuts at Twitter, telling employees at a town-hall meeting this summer that there needs to be "a rationalization of headcount" at the social network.

In April, Twitter accepted Musk's proposal to buy and make the social media service private. However, Musk soon began sowing doubt about his intentions to follow through with the agreement, alleging that the company failed to adequately disclose the number of spam and fake accounts on the service.

In July, in a surprising turn of events, Musk who had long been showing his interest to buy Twitter terminated the deal. The Tesla CEO did so by alleging that Twitter violated their mutual purchase agreement by misrepresenting the number of spam and fake bot accounts on its platform.

After Musk put out the deal termination announcement, the market saw a sharp decline. Later, Twitter sued Musk accusing him of using bots as a pretext to exit a deal. Again, last week, Musk confirmed that he would move forward with the Twitter buyout at the originally agreed price of USD 54.20 per share.