For over 24 hours, many X users, including this reporter, have encountered problems with the platform’s basic functions. Some posts fail to load, timelines remain frozen, and certain content only becomes visible after repeatedly refreshing the page.
The issue began Thursday afternoon, according to Downdetector, a service that tracks online outages. Starting at 2:12 PM (Eastern Time), thousands of users reported issues ranging from login failures to disappearing direct messages.
X’s engineering team acknowledged the degraded service in a post, linking it to a data center disruption:
“We’re aware that some users are experiencing limited performance on the platform today. We’re addressing an outage in one of our data centers, and the team is working to resolve it as quickly as possible,” the official account stated.
Per Wired, a fire broke out Thursday at an X-affiliated data center near Portland, Oregon, though it remains unclear whether this incident is connected to the ongoing service issues.
The last major X outage occurred in March, when users worldwide were abruptly logged out and faced difficulties loading feeds, sending messages, or interacting with content. At the time, Elon Musk claimed—without evidence—that the disruption was due to a cyberattack.
Previous large-scale outages took place in December 2022 and July 2023. More recently, in May of this year, many users briefly experienced timeline freezes.
Since Musk acquired X (formerly Twitter) for $44 billion in 2022, the company has undergone drastic cuts—shrinking its workforce by 80%, from 7,500 employees to just 1,300. According to CNBC, only 550 engineers remained by January 2023. A new round of layoffs in November 2024 primarily impacted the engineering team.
Under its new leadership, X has also faced criticism over security missteps, including server misconfigurations that may have left the platform vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks.
By: Nestor Castillo, ForAllTechNews Director