As Twitter glitches go from bad to worse, users are wondering how long it can keep working

() — Late last year, Dan Sinker found himself in the “Groundhog Day” situation. When he would check his notifications tab on Twitter, Sinker, who has tens of thousands of followers, would often see the platform recommend the same tweet from another user from weeks ago. As Sinker described the situation in a tweet in early December, “we went back to November 7 in my mentions again.”

The glitch was representative of a larger problem for Twitter: In the weeks after billionaire Elon Musk acquired the company in late October 2022 and began rapidly cutting staff, parts of the social network stopped working. Replies to tweets were out of order, the notifications tab was not updating, and the two-factor authentication tool was failing in some cases.

The situation appears to be getting worse as Musk continues to cut staff. On Monday, Twitter suffered its third service outage in less than a month and, according to NetBlocks, its sixth major outage in 2023, up from nine in all of 2022.

Some users who tried to load Twitter.com on Monday were met with an error message: “your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.” Other users were able to access the site, but were unable to view photos or click links. Less than a week earlier, users ran into a different, maddening problem: When trying to check their feeds, they’d see a “Welcome to Twitter!” message, as if they’d just joined the platform.

“It looks like pieces of the plane are falling off while we’re flying it. Will it still be able to fly and land? Probably, but every time a piece falls off it’s less safe,” Sinker, a writer who has been on Twitter since 2007, told . “You can’t trust it to be there anymore, and even if it’s there, you can’t trust it to act the way you think it’s going to act.”

Service outages and random crashes highlight the tensions between Twitter and its new owner. Musk has been quick to cut staff, reducing the company’s workforce from 7,500 employees to fewer than 2,000 today, in an urgent effort to cut costs at the company he acquired with significant debt. But by trying to cut for profitability, Musk risks making Twitter a less viable service.

The outages threaten to scare away users and advertisers, some of whom are already frustrated with Musk’s controversial remarks and his early decisions at the helm of the company. “When you couple it with other issues that are occurring, it becomes one more reason to potentially walk away from giving advertising dollars to Twitter,” Angelo Zino, a senior equity analyst at CFRA Research, told .

But there may not be an easy solution. NetBlocks director Alp Toker told that the service outages “can be traced back to the Twitter data center, indicating engineering failures or insufficient testing.” According to Zino, “they just don’t have enough engineers, to be honest with you.”

“It appears they went further (with the layoffs) and, to some extent, they had to because Musk overpaid for an acquisition where the debt he has to pay is significant,” Zino said. “It’s an unfortunate situation.”

Musk himself has acknowledged Twitter’s continuing struggle to stay online, though he has blamed the flaws more on the platform’s code than on poor staffing under his leadership.

“The code base is like a Rube Goldberg machine, and when you zoom in on one part of the Rube Goldberg machine, there’s another Rube Goldberg machine, and then there’s another,” Musk said at an event this week. “So it’s pretty hard to keep this thing running, and then it’s also hard to move the product forward because it’s really too complex, to say the least.”

Whatever the reason, the reality is the same for Twitter users: the service now seems to crash more often than ever since the days of “missing whale“, more than a decade ago, and it does so in many different ways.

This past weekend, users complained about glitches such as randomly unfollowing or unblocking people, old tweets resurfacing at the top of feeds, video streaming issues, bad links, and deleted drafts. Weeks beforeTwitter users had been experiencing other issues with the platform, such as the inability to tweet, send direct messages, or follow new accounts.

“I can’t see if people are replying to me. I have to go check. No notifications. And normal mentions don’t work. Not at all. Not once,” tweeted last week Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a writer for the New York Times. “It makes it not only not fun, but also unusable.”

Even when Twitter is up and running, some users have recently spotted a different problem: Their “For You” timelines seem clogged with posts they don’t want to see, including too many tweets and replies from Musk. After what some posts point out the sudden increase in Musk’s posts in user feeds last month, Twitter CEO answered: “Please stay tuned as we make adjustments.”

— ‘s Clare Duffy contributed to this article.