Some Twitter users said Monday they were unable to log in to their accounts via web browsers, the latest complaint of a technical problem since CEO Elon Musk cut many of the service’s employees.
A spike in reported problems began about 3 p.m. ET and lasted about three hours, according to Downdetector, a company that monitors complaints about online services.
Other ways to access Twitter, such as apps on mobile phones, appeared not to be affected.
The phrase “Desktop Twitter” was among the top trending topics on Twitter in the U.S. as people found other ways to post and express frustration with the service. Some people posted screenshots of Twitter asking them to create new accounts to get back on.
The cause of the outage was not immediately clear. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the complaints, and Musk had not tweeted about them as of 6 p.m. ET.
The reports echoed an episode in early February, when some people said they got error messages when they tried to post on Twitter.
Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion six months ago, has laid off the majority of its employees as he tries to contain costs and pay down debt.
Some former employees have said the cuts are taking a toll on Twitter's reliability, which depends on a complex network of large-scale computer servers and algorithms.