Elon Musk’s social media platform X, previously called Twitter, had a problem worldwide on Thursday. It lasted for more than an hour, and users couldn’t see tweets, as they mentioned in their complaints. X Pro, which used to be TweetDeck, also had the same issue.
Even though users could use Spaces and see notifications on Twitter, tweets disappeared from timelines and profiles, making them invisible. DownDetector, a tool that monitors the web, reported getting over 65,000 complaints from users around 9:10 pm Pacific time.
Social Media Platform (X) Goes Down
Elon Musk‘s X platform experienced a widespread outage lasting over an hour. In mobile apps, timelines failed to refresh, and on the web, a placeholder message appeared, saying, “Welcome to X! This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now.” Netblocks, the global internet trackers, observed a “significant international outage” not associated with any country-level blocks or filtering.
At about 1:35 AM ET, shortly after this article was published, access to timelines was restored, although we haven’t heard what caused the problem.
Twitter has faced outages before, especially after significant staff reductions, making the site more prone to problems with reliability. Despite that, the service had been quite dependable in recent months, until this recent incident.
The previous major outage happened in early July when Twitter was still called by that name. Users experienced errors like “rate limit exceeded” and “cannot retrieve tweets.” Elon Musk later clarified that these errors were deliberately triggered to prevent extensive data scraping from his platform.
Conclusion
Elon Musk’s X platform, formerly Twitter, encountered a widespread outage, affecting timelines and profiles globally for over an hour. Despite recent reliability, the incident mirrored past outages. Notably, a deliberate error-triggering in July aimed to curb data scraping. The impact sparked over 65,000 user complaints on DownDetector.
