For over an hour on Thursday, thousands of users experienced difficulties accessing the social media platform
The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has been reinstated following a global outage on Thursday. The issue arose around 5 am UK time, and its cause is currently unknown.
Numerous users reported difficulty accessing the site during this period. Downdetector, a website tracking online outages, recorded 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 experienced an inability to view posts, instead receiving a “Welcome to X!” message. Meanwhile, X Pro users, previously using Tweetdeck, encountered a message stating “Waiting for posts.”
Last autumn, Elon Musk acquired the platform in a $44 billion (£33.6 billion) deal.
Using the hashtag #TwitterDown, users with access shared memes about the outage, with many envisioning Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg celebrating.
NetBlocks, a company monitoring internet disruption, reported a “significant international outage” on X, noting issues like timelines not loading and posts failing. The incident was clarified as unrelated to “country-level internet disruptions or filtering.”
Following Musk’s takeover, attempts to reach X’s press team result in automatic replies. Initially using a poo emoji, the auto response on Thursday read, “Busy now, please check back later.”
Since Musk’s acquisition in October 2022, the platform has encountered 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 about the quality of X’s IT infrastructure existed prior to Musk’s takeover. In July 2022, the former head of security at the then-Twitter, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging “extreme, egregious deficiencies by Twitter in every area of his mandate.”
The complaint detailed an incident in spring 2021 when a shutdown seemed likely, risking leaving the platform offline for “weeks, months, or permanently.”
