A sudden outage hits the X platform globally
The social media platform X (formerly Twitter) returned to normal operation Monday afternoon after a sudden technical outage affected millions of users worldwide. The temporary disruption prevented users from viewing posts on their homepages, with many seeing a blank welcome message instead of the usual tweets.
According to Down Detector, a website that tracks digital service outages, a sharp and sudden spike in outage reports from users was recorded approximately two hours before service was restored around 3:30 PM GMT. NetBlocks, an organization that monitors internet connectivity globally, confirmed that the X platform experienced "international outages," emphasizing that the disruption was in no way related to nationwide internet shutdowns or government blocking, indicating that the problem was internal to the platform's infrastructure.
The context of technological disruptions in the Elon Musk era
This outage comes amid a series of challenges and radical changes the platform has faced since its acquisition by American billionaire Elon Musk in a massive $44 billion deal in October 2022. Following the acquisition, Musk took unprecedented steps, including laying off thousands of employees, including those on engineering and technical stability teams, raising concerns among many experts about the platform's ability to maintain operational stability. He also changed the platform's name from "Twitter" to "x," as part of his vision to transform it into an "everything app" integrating social networking, financial services, and more. The company was later merged with his new artificial intelligence subsidiary, xAI, which develops the "Grok" chatbot, a competitor to ChatGPT.
The importance of the platform and the impact of frequent outages
The X platform is a vital tool for disseminating news and information instantly, relied upon by journalists, government officials, activists, and businesses to communicate with the public and report breaking news. Therefore, any service disruption, even a brief one, can have a significant impact on the global flow of information. These recurring outages raise questions about the platform's technical reliability under its new management and could erode the trust of users and the companies that depend on it for their marketing campaigns and customer service. Despite service disruptions in several countries, including France and Thailand, no official statement has been issued by platform spokespeople to explain the cause of the outage—a pattern that has become commonplace since Musk took over.
