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X (formerly Twitter) returns after global outage

X, formerly known as Twitter, went down for about 90 minutes for users worldwide early on Thursday ET.

Anyone opening the social media app across all platforms was met with a blank timeline. On desktop, users saw a message that simply read, “Welcome to X,” while on mobile the app showed suggestions for accounts to follow.

What caused the outage is not yet clear. A message sent to the platform’s email address for media inquiries receives the same response it always sends: “Busy now, please check back later.”

When other social media platforms suffer disruption, X is usually the go-to service for people wishing to vent their frustrations. But folks had to turn elsewhere during X’s outage on Thursday morning. Comments on Down Detector, a site that monitors the performance of online services and which confirmed X’s outage, started to appear early Thursday.

“Everybody else’s account acting like it’s the first time you logged in?” said one, while another commented: “My Twitter has completely crashed. Can’t see any posts whatsoever.”

Following about 90 minutes of downtime, normal service appears to have resumed on X. The company’s support account has yet to offer any explanation for the outage or information on whether it’s been fully resolved. We’ll update this article when more details on the recent disruption come to light.

This is the second incident to strike the social media platform’s service this month after outgoing links briefly broke a week ago.

X suffered a series of outages earlier in the year in the wake of significant layoffs that came as new owner Elon Musk overhauled the company. Such service disruption had eased more recently, so Thursday’s downtime may have come as a surprise to some who were getting used to a smoother service.

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Trevor Mogg
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