Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced a temporary outage early Saturday that affected thousands of users across the United States, according to Downdetector, a service that monitors internet disruptions.
Reports of issues began to surge around 8 a.m. ET, peaking at over 25,000 user complaints by 8:26 a.m. Users reported problems with both the website and mobile app, including difficulties connecting to servers. The situation began to improve later in the morning, with reports dropping to around 690 by 11:30 a.m.
The disruption wasn’t limited to the U.S. — over 11,000 users in the United Kingdom and hundreds more across other countries also experienced problems. Since Downdetector relies on self-reported user data, the actual scale of the outage may have been larger than reflected.
X’s engineering team previously linked access issues on Friday to a data center outage. Tech publication Wired reported that a fire occurred Thursday morning at a Hillsboro, Oregon data center leased by the platform.
Initial signs of trouble surfaced Thursday around 2 p.m. ET. According to X’s developer platform, a site-wide outage extended from Thursday into Friday but has since been marked as resolved. However, login services continued to suffer from “degraded performance” into Friday, and that issue remained ongoing.
In a public post, X said, “Our team is working 24/7 to resolve this. Thanks for your patience — updates soon.”
Owner Elon Musk, who bought the platform in 2022, acknowledged the technical difficulties in a post Saturday morning. Replying to a user who speculated the issues stemmed from the data center fire, Musk said, “Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms. I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out.”
He added that the platform’s backup systems should have prevented the disruption. “As evidenced by the X uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made. The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
In March, the platform also experienced a significant outage, which Musk attributed to a “massive cyberattack.”
As of 2024, X reported an average of 250 million daily active users. On March 28, Musk announced he had sold X to his artificial intelligence company, xAI.
