Image: © Sundry Photography/Stock.adobe.com
Meanwhile, the DPC has expressed concerns that Twitter Blue is being brought to the EU before the watchdog was consulted.
Twitter suffered its second outage in a week, as users reported issues with viewing images and clicking links on the platform.
The issues began yesterday and appeared to impact users in various countries, with more than 900 reports of problems for Irish users according to DownDetector.
Twitter’s support account posted at the time that some parts of the platform were “not working as expected” due to an internal change that had “some unintended consequences”.
The outage appeared to be resolved after roughly an hour. During this time, some users saw an error message when clicking links that said their “current API plan does not include access to this endpoint”, TechCrunch reports.
This is the second global outage the social media platform has suffered in a week, with the previous one causing various functions – including the timeline – to break down for users last week.
In the earlier outage, users reportedly couldn’t access the Following section to see other profiles, while others complained that the For You section of the site showed much older tweets.
These outages followed another wave of job cuts at the company which took place more than a week ago. It was reported at the time that Elon Musk cut at least 50 staff from the company, though other reports say the figure was as high as 200.
Since Musk took over Twitter, the number of employees at Twitter has dropped from 7,500 to an estimated 2,000 or less. Last November, staff members were reportedly concerned that Twitter could break down in the near future due to the reduced staff count.
DPC concerns
Meanwhile, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has expressed concerns regarding Twitter’s decision to bring its Blue subscription service to the EU.
In an interview, Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon said the DPC was previously “reassured” that Twitter Blue would not roll out in the EU and “certainly not before there have been discussions with our office”, Reuters reports.
Dixon also said there has been a “breakdown of communications” with Twitter’s Dublin office, RTÉ reports.
The DPC released its annual report today (7 March), which shows the watchdog concluded 17 large-scale inquiries in 2022 that resulted in more than €1bn in fines.
The report also shows the DPC is preparing a draft decision on Twitter’s data breaches last year. It was reported last November that various datasets of Twitter users were being sold online. The DPC said these datasets reportedly mapped Twitter IDs to private data such as email addresses and phone numbers.
10 things you need to know direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of essential sci-tech news.
