X Was Down but Its Spirit Is Unbroken
The largest X outage to hit Elon Musk’s platform X since the billionaire acquired the previously famous social media site, Twitter, occurred in the past few hours. It was a brief but significant disruption that is now ending.
For over an hour, the X platform ceased to operate. Timelines on mobile apps did not update, and users were greeted with a placeholder message stating, “Welcome to X! The best place to see what’s happening in your world is right here. Now choose some people and subjects to follow.” Netblocks, a global internet tracker, reported a “significant international outage” that did not align with any country-level blocks or filtering.
Timelines became accessible again around 1:35 AM ET, but there was no immediate explanation for the x outage that had taken place.
How It All Went Down
It was unusual but posting on the site continued to function even after the posts disappeared following a refresh. Additionally, accounts with enabled notifications continued to receive feed updates and push notifications for new posts. Despite being unable to view new posts, over 800 people discussed the outage on a Space hosted by New York Times reporter Ryan Mac.
The timelines remained blank, preventing any useful information from appearing on the accounts of Support, X CEO Linda Yaccarino, and owner/CTO Elon Musk. Furthermore, the service’s API (Application Programming Interface) Status page was not updated to reflect any issues.
Reports of problems began to surface on Down Detector shortly before 12:30 AM ET, but there was no indication of the problem’s cause or an estimated time for service restoration.
There have been other significant outages on the website recently. Last week, an issue caused external links to break for several hours. For those paying for Premium service (or hoping to be paid), the platform’s PR account email only returned an automated “Busy now, please check back later” message. As usual, these individuals will have to seek updates on the platform’s status elsewhere.
Giving Musk the Benefit of the Doubt
For many, Twitter served as a crucial source of news, conversation, and community. A year after Mr. Musk’s takeover, users have observed changes, both positive and negative.
When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in April 2022, he implemented changes that transformed the platform into a reflection of himself.
Musk contributed significantly; he expressed his opinions freely and created a space for others to discuss topics labeled as ‘misinformation’ on other social media platforms. He never hesitated to voice his thoughts on any person or subject. Therefore, the X outage shouldn’t be this big of a deal.
One could argue that the closest thing we have to democracy is platform X.
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