Well, that was quick. About thirty minutes after X started to experience an issue with its mobile and desktop interface, engineers at the company appear to have sorted it out.
While posts were still appearing in an account’s main feed, if you headed to the homepage of a particular account, you were met with a blank page and a message saying that the user had yet to post anything. For example, here’s how it affected the account of Elon Musk, the owner of X and a prolific poster:
The problem started at around 6:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday and appeared to affect users globally.
At one point, Downdetector, a site that tracks and reports real-time outages and problems for websites, apps, and online services, received more than 7,000 user reports of issues with X. Comments on Downdetector’s X page included, “Here we go again,” and “Why can’t Elon fix his own app?”
X last suffered an outage just a few days ago, on May 30. The disruption began around 3:45 p.m. ET and lasted for about three hours, according to reports. During this period, users experienced issues such as duplicate posts, being logged out, and losing access to their feeds and posting capabilities.
The social media app also suffered problems on May 22. Across a 24-hour period, some posts wouldn’t load, timelines failed to update, and some messages could only be viewed after refreshing the site.
Some have attributed the choppier service to changes made by Musk after he acquired the company, then called Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022.
Early on, the billionaire entrepreneur laid off a significant chunk of the workforce, including many many engineers who were responsible for maintaining uptime and addressing bugs. Musk also likes to push fast-paced rollouts of new features without extensive testing, which can lead to problems.
If any more information comes to light about Tuesday’s brief outage, we’ll be sure to share it here.
