Twitter back after two-hour outage affected tweets

Thousands of people around the world were unable to use Twitter for two hours on Wednesday after the social network suffered another outage.

The Following and For you feeds - which display tweets on the platform's homepage - instead carried a notice reading "Welcome to Twitter". 

The outage-tracking site DownDetector reported the issues at 10:00 GMT, but they seemed to be resolved by 12:00.

It came as Twitter reportedly laid off 200 staff members on Monday.

More than 5,000 people in the UK alone reported problems to DownDetector within half an hour of the fault appearing, with many more affected worldwide.

The For you feed, a collection of tweets from people similar to those they follow, first appeared to be working just an hour after the issues emerged, while the Following feed, which collects tweets from people who users are following on Twitter, took longer to be fixed.

And the site's search tool is also working again, after it briefly stopped displaying any tweets in the Latest tab.

Despite the feeds not working, users were still able to tweet as normal - even if their tweets were falling on deaf ears - leading to the phrases "#TwitterDown" and "Welcome To Twitter" being among the top trends on the platform.

There have been several intermittent outages in recent months, with a temporary outage in early February seeing some users told they were over the daily limit for sending tweets.

The BBC has approached Twitter for comment.