Twitter’s latest outage is logging out desktop users

Twitter had plenty of problems in February (the rate limit debacle) and March (when it broke all links and pictures), but through April, the service didn’t register outages of similar significance. Now it’s May, and the streak has ended early as a number of people (including many Verge staffers) report the Twitter.com desktop website has logged them out without warning and won’t let them log back in.

It’s unclear what’s causing the problem, and in place of a functional PR department, Twitter responds to press inquiries with only a poop emoji, so who knows when things may be fixed or if a single engineer has managed to crash something big… again.

The outage is, coincidentally, occurring exactly at the same time it’s becoming a little easier to sign up for a new account on Mastodon (or Bluesky, if you can snag an invite).

Twitter’s owner and CEO Elon Musk most recently responded to a tweet noting that his car company, Tesla, now has 20 million followers on Twitter, with no commentary about how many of them might be bots or if any of them have signed up to pay for a Twitter Blue subscription and accompanying verified checkmark.

Earlier in the day, word was spreading that for many “legacy verified” accounts that had their blue logo removed last month, they could briefly recover the label by simply editing their profile information. Forcing everyone to log out might be one way of addressing that issue or just another sign of Twitter’s recent instability.