Photo by Alexander Shatov for Unsplash
X Suffers Temporary Worldwide Outage
December 21, 2023
The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, suffered a one-hour global outage on Dec. 20. The outage affected over 94,000 users in countries including the U.S., Canada, and India.
While the website and the mobile application were accessible, users could not view tweets on their feeds. All tabs on the platform, including “Following,” “For You,” and “Lists,” were empty.
For an hour or so, users were not able to use the site correctly, with problems such as the inability to refresh the feed, the failure to post, disappearing posts from the timeline, and a message replacing the feed that said, “Welcome to X! This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now.”
Within minutes of the outage, the hashtag #TwitterDown started trending on the social media platform. Despite the outage, users could still tweet, but they were not visible to anyone, according to The Independent.
Most reports came from app users, comprising about 70% of all accounts, while web users formed around 20%, per Bloomberg. Users of the platform’s blue tick premium subscription service, X Pro, were also facing issues, with their feeds showing the message “Waiting for posts.”
After roughly 45 minutes, X began resolving the issues, and user timelines gradually returned to normal. Although the cause of the outage has yet to be confirmed, experts have speculated that it may have been due to technical glitches or routine maintenance.
In April 2023, Elon Musk renamed the popular platform from Twitter to X. When he first bought the platform a year before, he also laid off half its staff, changed moderation and verification policies, and unbanned extremist accounts, reported CNET.
This is not the first outage X has seen on its platform this year. During a recent October 2023 outage, many X users were either unable to log in to their accounts or get online at all. The reason behind the more recent global outage remains unclear.
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