On Saturday morning, the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced a widespread outage that left tens of thousands of users unable to access the service. The disruptions began around 8:00 a.m. Eastern Time, with users in the United States reporting the highest number of issues.
By 8:26 a.m., over 25,000 users had reported problems on Downdetector, a website that tracks outages. The disruption affected both the mobile app and the website, with many users encountering server connectivity errors. The number of reports gradually fell to about 690 by 11:30 a.m., signaling a partial recovery. Users in the United Kingdom also faced difficulties, with more than 11,000 reports of outages. Other countries reported fewer problems. Since Downdetector relies on user submissions, the true number of affected users may be higher.
Engineers at X traced the cause of the outage to a fire that occurred at a data center in Hillsboro, Oregon. The fire started on Thursday morning and caused service instability that lasted over two days. Reports of technical problems first appeared around 2:00 p.m. on Thursday. Later that day, X confirmed a site-wide outage on its developer platform. While the outage was marked as resolved on Friday, login issues continued into the weekend. Technicians acknowledged the problem had not been fully contained and committed to restoring full functionality.
Elon Musk addressed the outage on Saturday, linking it to the fire and noting that critical backup systems had failed during the incident. He emphasized the need for urgent infrastructure improvements at the platform. Teams have been working long hours to repair the damage. Musk is also managing responsibilities at his other companies, including xAI, Tesla, and the upcoming Starship rocket launch. Engineers assured users that repair efforts are ongoing and thanked the public for their patience, promising to provide updates as the situation develops.
This outage is the latest setback for the platform, which suffered a major disruption in March attributed to a cyberattack. That incident also caused significant interruptions to the platform’s services. X currently reports around 250 million daily users in 2024. In March, Musk announced that ownership of the platform had been transferred to his artificial intelligence venture, xAI. The company has not yet provided a detailed explanation of the latest outage or specific plans to prevent similar incidents in the future.