On Monday, thousands of people around the world couldn’t use X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, because of a major technical problem.
Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, reported that about 2,000 users in India, 18,000 in the United States, and 10,000 in the United Kingdom were affected. X hasn’t made any official announcement about what caused the problem.
The app, owned by billionaire Elon Musk since 2022, stopped people from posting or seeing tweets and even prevented them from logging in. If people were already using the app or website, they saw a message telling them to refresh the page because something wasn’t working.
Downdetector said that 60% of the problems were with the app itself, 35% with the website, and 5% with the connection to the server. Over 22,000 users in the US reported problems around the same time, with 31% having issues with the website and 58% with the app.
The problems mostly affected big cities like New York and Los Angeles in the US, and London and Birmingham in the UK. Despite the widespread issues, X hasn’t yet released an official explanation of the problem or said when it expects to be fixed.
Meanwhile, many users took to Threads, a rival social media platform owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s company Meta, to complain about X’s problems. One X user joked, “Users running to Twitter to tweet Twitter is down #TwitterDown.” Another said, “Twitter was down for like 30 minutes and I felt my world collapsing.” A third user commented, “X (Twitter) is down. Congratulations to Threads on millions of new users today,” while a fourth added, “Is X/Twitter down for y’all? I hate being here” followed by crying emojis.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, changed its name to X, and created X Corp to manage it. He also introduced a paid “premium” version of the app with extra features, like editing tweets, uploading longer videos, and writing longer posts (up to 25,000 characters). While the free version of X is still available, three X Premium plans cost £3/month, £8/month, and £31/month.
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