For more than 24 hours, users of social media platform X have been encountering significant disruptions, including malfunctioning timelines, difficulties viewing posts, and failed message loads. These persistent technical issues began Thursday afternoon, attracting thousands of complaints from frustrated users.
According to Downdetector, a service designed to track web outages through user-generated reports, problems commenced around 2:12 p.m. Eastern on Thursday. Users have reported diverse difficulties ranging from being unable to log into accounts to losing access to direct messages.
X’s official engineering team publicly confirmed the outages, stating in a brief message that the disruptions were related to an ongoing data center issue. The message indicated the company’s engineers were actively addressing the problem.
Additional reports suggest a fire occurred on Thursday at one of X’s leased data centers located near Portland, Oregon, though there’s not yet any official confirmation directly linking this incident to the current service breakdown.
This outage is the latest in a series of technical disruptions at X since Elon Musk acquired the company, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022. In the immediate aftermath of the takeover, Musk reduced the company’s headcount dramatically, from approximately 7,500 employees down to just around 1,300 by early 2023. At that time, the company reportedly retained only 550 full-time engineering staff.
The platform faced a similar large-scale outage in March of this year, when users worldwide experienced abrupt disconnections, inaccessible timelines, and message failures. Elon Musk at that time attributed the disruptions—without providing detailed evidence—to a cyberattack.
Previously, the platform encountered multiple substantial instances of downtime and partial disruption in December 2022 and July 2023 as well. Most recently, users had issues with their timelines failing to refresh in early May.
Adding to these problems, the company has struggled with security-related incidents amid allegations of server misconfigurations and vulnerability to potential denial-of-service attacks, drawing further scrutiny since Musk’s takeover.
The ongoing issues have prompted widespread criticism regarding reliability and have raised renewed concerns over the impact of Musk’s extensive workforce reductions on the platform’s overall operational stability and security.
