According to Downdetector, which tracks website outages around the globe, the Twitter website was intermittently inaccessible for users in the United States and elsewhere, including Canada, Argentina, the United Kingdom, the Philippines and Germany for a two-hour stretch of time starting at around 4 p.m. PST. Instead of seeing the timeline pop up when visiting Twitter's homepage, users who faced the outage received an error message: "Something went wrong, but don't fret — it's not your fault. Let's try again." 

The iPhone and Android versions of Twitter were largely unaffected; the only glitch that this writer and other SFGATE staffers observed was that that notifications tab did not appear to be updating. This writer also found that the website was operational when not logged in.

The cause of this Twitter outage is unclear. Twitter has laid off nearly 75% of its staff, according to some estimates. Elon Musk took over the site in late October; he said that Twitter is still up for him in a tweet, but did not specify whether he was using the app or the site. (Twitter also removed the function that shows the device users are posting from.)

Twitter no longer has a communications department.