A key part of Twitter appears to either have been taken down deliberately or is malfunctioning.

The “following” tab, which many people have as their home screen on the social media platform, has stopped working for thousands of users.

According to Down Detector – a site which tracks website outages – the first major spike in reports of potential problems with Twitter appeared at around 10am on Wednesday morning.

When Twitter users tried to navigate to that part of the site they were met with a message reading: “Welcome to Twitter! This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now.”

It was unclear what had caused the outage of the page, and the rest of Twitter appeared to still be working as usual.

Users can still see Twitter lists, and the new “for you” section that the site unveiled after Elon Musk took over last year.

Twitter users were still able to tweet on the site which allowed the hashtag TwitterDown to become the top trending phrase in the UK.

Twitter has been laying off staff for months as Mr Musk tries to cut costs at the social media site.

He borrowed heavily when buying the company for 44 billion dollars (£37 billion) in October last year.