X faces its biggest outage in the Elon Musk reign

Elon Musk’s owned — FKA Twitter — ‘X’, encountered its most significant user-reported outage since the billionaire’s acquisition, causing widespread disruptions that have since been largely resolved. More than 94,000 users reported issues on X at 1:41 p.m. Hong Kong time on Thursday, as per reports on Downdetector. However, within an hour, the number of reported issues dwindled to about 7,000.

The San Francisco-based platform, purchased by Musk for $44 billion in late 2022, has experienced multiple outages. Thursday’s incident surpassed the previous largest outage in July of that year, affecting about 50,000 users. The cause of the latest disruption remains unknown.

While X and Musk’s accounts on the platform did not mention the outage, services were restored after an outage lasting more than an hour. During the outage, Twitter users globally faced issues with tweet visibility across all tabs, although they could create and post tweets. Twitter Spaces, however, remained operational, with users discussing the outage.

This recent incident adds to a series of technical problems at X in the past months. On December 14, outgoing links from X suddenly stopped working due to an issue with the URL redirect function. The platform faced disruptions in March and July of the same year. In July, over 13,000 instances of X being down were recorded, with users encountering a “rate limited” error message.

Today, access to timelines was eventually restored, but the cause of the problem remains undisclosed. X’s recent technical issues raise concerns about the platform’s reliability and its ability to provide a stable user experience. Questions linger about the platform’s infrastructure and its resilience to handle large-scale disruptions as X continues to grapple with outages, specially since most of the original tech team has been downsized or fired.