For over 24 hours, many X users, including this reporter, have experienced issues with the basic features of the site. Some messages will not load, the timeline will not be updated, and certain posts will not be displayed without a web page update (or multiple).
The trouble began on Thursday afternoon, according to Downdetector, a crowdsourcing platform for flagging web outages. From 2:12pm in the East, thousands of users submitted a report on bugs that started from unable to sign in to disappearing messages directly.
X’s official engineering account confirmed the degraded service in a post on Thursday, claiming it was linked to the data center outage.
“X recognizes that some of our users are experiencing performance issues with the platform today,” the account wrote. “We have experienced data center outages and our team is actively working to fix the issue.”
Wired reported a fire broke out Thursday at a data center leased at X near Portland, Oregon. It is unclear whether it is related to an ongoing outage.
The last major service disruption X suffered was in March when users from around the world suddenly disconnected from social networks, then accessed their feeds, sent messages, and engaged in content. Musk condemned the cyberattacks without evidence.
Before that outage, X experienced major connectivity issues in December 2022 and July 2023. Recently, the X Timeline has temporarily stopped updating many users.
After Musk acquired X, previously known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022, he quickly cut the company’s workforce by about 80% from 7,500 employees to 1,300 workers. According to CNBC, X had 550 full-time engineers as of January 2023. A new wave of layoffs struck the company in November 2024, affecting X’s engineering department primarily.
Since Musk bought X, the company reportedly created security Snafus, improperly configuring a server that may have left the site vulnerable to denial of service attacks.