For over 24 hours, many X users, including this reporter, have been experiencing issues with the site’s basic functionality. Some messages won’t load, timelines won’t update, and certain posts can’t be seen without a webpage refresh (or several).
The trouble started Thursday afternoon, according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced platform for flagging web outages. Beginning at 2:12 p.m. Eastern, thousands of users submitted reports about bugs ranging from an inability to sign in to disappearing direct messages.
X’s official Engineering account acknowledged the degraded service in a post on Thursday, claiming it was related to a data center outage.
“X is aware some of our users are experiencing performance issues on the platform today,” wrote the account. “We are experiencing a data center outage and the team is actively working to remediate the issue.”
Wired reported that a fire broke out Thursday at an X-leased data center near Portland, Oregon. It’s unclear if it’s related to the ongoing outages.
The last major service disruption X suffered was in March, when users worldwide were abruptly disconnected from the social network and subsequently had trouble accessing their feeds, sending messages, and engaging with content. Musk, without evidence, blamed the disruption on a cyberattack.
Prior to that outage, X experienced large-scale connectivity issues in December 2022 and July 2023. More recently, in May, X timelines briefly stopped updating for many users.
After Musk acquired X, formerly known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022, he promptly slashed the company’s workforce by about 80%, from 7,500 employees to 1,300 workers. X had just 550 full-time engineers as of January 2023, according to CNBC. A new wave of layoffs hit the company in November 2024, primarily affecting X’s engineering department.
Since Musk’s purchase of X, the company has also reportedly made security snafus, improperly configuring servers that might’ve left the site vulnerable to denial of service attacks.
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