Twitter users have endured a second service outage in a week, reporting login and loading problems, as the social media platform’s owner Elon Musk continues to slash costs at the company.

Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, reported thousands of complaints from Australians beginning on Wednesday about 6am AEDT. The total scale of the outage and its cause remains unknown. “User reports indicate possible problems at Twitter,” Downdetector reported.

Twitter has remained online, with the outage a popular topic among Australian users who managed to access the site. Users were still reporting problems with the hashtag “TwitterDown” at early evening.

Some described initially being unable to log in, while others encountered lengthy loading times or tweets that would not appear. Some users attempting to load tweets were met with a message reading: “Uh oh, an error was encountered”.

It comes after the social media site suffered a partial outage last Thursday, when users had problems with notifications, video and logging into the service.

Musk finalised his $US44 billion ($65 billion) purchase of Twitter in October through a deal that saddled the company with billions in debt, requiring hefty interest payments. He fired thousands of staff and disconnected company servers, “cutting costs like crazy”, as Musk put it to an online forum in late December. Twitter was losing money even before Musk’s acquisition.

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A day before Christmas, Musk said on Twitter that he had disconnected one of the company’s “more sensitive” server racks and likened its infrastructure to a “fractal of Rube Goldberg machines”.

The Tesla chief executive’s management of Twitter has resulted in advertisers leaving the platform, denting the company’s bottom line amid a broader advertising downturn triggered by a shaky global economy.