Twitter down the same day Jack Dorsey launches decentralized alternative

Thousands of Twitter users were unable to view tweets while Jack Dorsey’s decentralized social network Bluesky grabbed attention online.

Twitter suffered another outage on March 1 as thousands of users flagged issues with Elon Musk’s social media platform. The outage took place as Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s new project, Bluesky, went into beta testing.

Data from Downdetector showed thousands of issue reports from Twitter users from 9 am UTC, with issues slowly being resolved over a five hour period. 59% of the reported problems were from mobile app users while a further 35% of issues were flagged by website users.

Twitter is yet to issue any updates on the cause of the outage, but various reports indicate that users in different parts of the world experienced issues. Issues included the Following and For You feeds not displaying any tweets or content.

The New York Times reported that a further 200 employees had been retrenched from the company over the weekend. Since Musk took over the social media platform, Twitter’s staff numbers have been reduced from over 7500 to under 2000. According to the report, product managers, data scientists and engineers were among those that were let go by the company.

While Twitter grappled with its latest outage, Dorsey’s decentralized social media platform Bluesky went into private beta testing. As Cointelegraph reported, the mobile application became available to select users through an invite-only beta testing.

Related: What are decentralized social networks?

According to initial reports, the application has been available on the Apple app store since Feb. 17 and had over 2000 downloads by the end of the month. The app is not yet available on Android.

A report in January suggested that Twitter was developing payment features for the application, with the possibility of onboarding cryptocurrency functionality in the future. The social media app also rolled out a cryptocurrency price search feature in January which featured over 30 different tokens. 

Bluesky emerged as a side product of Twitter in 2019, aiming to create an open and decentralized standard for social media. Meanwhile, another decentralized social media platform, Damus, went live in February 2023 as well. The platform is a messaging service built on Nostr, a decentralized network powering encrypted end-to-end private messaging and other services.