The social media platform X, formerly Twitter, experienced a brief service disruption affecting its mobile and desktop interfaces, but engineers resolved the issue approximately thirty minutes after it began. This latest X outage underscores ongoing concerns about the platform’s stability.
What Happened During the X Outage?
While users could still see posts in their main feeds, navigating to an individual account’s homepage presented a blank page with a message indicating the user had not yet posted. This impacted numerous accounts, including that of X owner Elon Musk, a typically prolific poster on the platform.
Elon Musk's X profile page showing a blank feed and 'user hasn't posted' message during the recent X platform outage.
The problems commenced around 6:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday and appeared to have a global impact on users.
User Reactions and A Pattern of Instability
Downdetector, a service that monitors website and app issues, recorded over 7,000 user reports flagging problems with X during the incident. Frustrated users left comments on Downdetector’s X page, with remarks such as, “Here we go again,” and “Why can’t Elon fix his own app?”
This is not an isolated event for the platform. X suffered a more prolonged outage recently on May 30th. That disruption started around 3:45 p.m. ET and lasted for approximately three hours. During that time, users reported various X issues, including duplicate posts, being unexpectedly logged out, and losing access to their feeds and the ability to post. Prior to that, on May 22nd, the social media app experienced problems over a 24-hour period where some posts failed to load, timelines did not update correctly, and certain messages were only viewable after refreshing the site.
Speculation on Causes: Musk’s Overhaul and Its Consequences
Some observers attribute the increasingly frequent service disruptions to significant changes implemented by Elon Musk following his $44 billion acquisition of the company, then known as Twitter, in 2022.
Early in his tenure, Musk initiated substantial layoffs, reducing the workforce considerably. This included many engineers who were crucial for maintaining platform uptime and addressing technical glitches. Furthermore, Musk is known for advocating rapid rollouts of new features, often with limited extensive testing, a practice that can introduce instability and lead to operational problems.
Should further details regarding Tuesday’s brief X outage emerge, we will provide updates.
