X, formerly known as Twitter (how long do we have to keep saying this, really?) suffered an outage Thursday evening that continued into Friday morning. The company has blamed it on a problem with their data center. According to multiple reports, the social media platform began struggling to perform correctly Thursday night and those problems have persisted.
As of writing this (7 a.m. CST), the service is still receiving reports of problems from users, but not at the same level as last night. Handy dandy website DownForEveryoneorJustMe.com continues to show problems with X worldwide, mainly with accessibility but also direct messaging and other tools on the platform.
The social media has reported an outage in its data center and says it is working to restore services, but there is no timetable.
This is the second time this year X has had a significant outage. Billionaire owner Elon Musk blamed the first, in March, on a cyberattack though that was never substantiated. Since Musk bought the social media giant in October 2022, it has been plagued with issues including service outages, massive layoffs, and internal squabbling. Reportedly shaky infrastructure has created problems while scores of users have existed the platform due primarily to Musk’s handling of the site.
In addition to re-opening X to “free speech” that allows cyber bullying, hateful content, racist outbursts and misleading information, Musk has been a lightning rod for criticism over his haphazard handling of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) he was brought in to manage under President Donald Trump. Despite many grand pronouncements, it has been widely reported the overall savings to taxpayers are far, far less than what the agency has said while wreaking havoc with many other government agencies seeing their budgets slashed without explanation.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s stock has been in free fall and Musk announced in April that he would be stepping away from DOGE to focus on his car company.
While X scrambles to fully recover from this latest outage, it is unlikely to bounce back to the subscriber numbers it had before Musk took over.
