The global outage has ended, and Elon Musk’s X is back online
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Thousands of users faced challenges accessing the social media platform for more than an hour on Thursday
The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has been restored after a global outage on Thursday. The issue occurred around 5 am UK time, and its cause is currently unknown.
During this period, numerous users reported difficulties accessing the site. Downdetector, a website tracking online outages, registered over 30,000 reports for the site and app between 5 am and 7 am in the UK, and more than 260,000 reports in the US during the same time frame, with the majority occurring between 5:30 am and 6:30 am.
X users faced challenges viewing posts, receiving a “Welcome to X!” message instead. Meanwhile, X Pro users, who previously used Tweetdeck, encountered a message stating “Waiting for posts.”
In a $44 billion (£33.6 billion) deal last autumn, Elon Musk acquired the platform.
Users with access shared memes about the outage using the hashtag #TwitterDown, with many imagining Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg celebrating.
NetBlocks, a company that monitors internet disruptions, reported a “significant international outage” on X, highlighting issues such as timelines not loading and posts failing. The incident was clarified as unrelated to “country-level internet disruptions or filtering.”
Attempts to reach X’s press team after Musk’s takeover result in automatic replies. Initially featuring a poo emoji, the auto response on Thursday stated, “Busy now, please check back later.”
Since Musk’s acquisition in October 2022, the platform has experienced multiple glitches. The workforce was reduced from 7,500 to about 2,000 within six months of Musk’s leadership.
Among the thousands of employees who lost their jobs, engineers responsible for resolving and preventing service outages were included. One former engineer, who resigned shortly after the initial round of layoffs, mentioned leaving because they would have been “on call constantly with little support for an indeterminate amount of time on several additional complex systems I had no experience in.
Concerns regarding the quality of X’s IT infrastructure were present before Musk’s acquisition. In July 2022, the former head of security at the platform when it was known as Twitter, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, filed a whistleblower complaint citing “extreme, egregious deficiencies by Twitter in every area of his mandate.”
The complaint outlined an incident in spring 2021 when a shutdown appeared imminent, posing the risk of leaving the platform offline for “weeks, months, or permanently.
