Twitter goes down: Social network suffers outage days after announcing the sacking of 300 employees

Twitter has suffered a minor outage this afternoon days after announcing plans to fire over 300 employees. The social network was unavailable both on browsers and through its official app for some users. Tweetdeck, the Twitter-owned client also experienced problems. Users received the standard error message, explaining that "something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing - we're going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon." The site is back up and running at the moment. It's not yet clear what caused the drop in service, but Twitter is currently going through a bit of a restructure. The social media giant has revealed plans to sack more than 300 people , amounting to an estimated 8% of its total workforce. It announced the potentially controversial "streamlining" scheme in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A total of 336 people are expected to get the boot, although Twitter vowed to "go to great lengths to take care of each individual by providing generous exit packages and help finding a new job". The decision was made after co-founder Jack Dorsey was recently re-instated as the company's CEO.

Twitter co-founder and Executive Chairman Jack Dorsey speaks during US President Barack Obama's Twitter Town Hall

“Product and Engineering are going to make the most significant structural changes to reflect our plan ahead,” wrote Dorsey. “We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our workforce. And the rest of the organization will be streamlined in parallel.” Twitter is expected to shell out up to $15 million in severance payments.