Technical Woes Hit X (Twitter)
Microblogging site X, formerly known as Twitter, encountered a significant technical glitch at around 11 am today. Users logging into both the website and the mobile application were greeted with a puzzling ‘Welcome to your timeline’ message instead of the usual stream of tweets, indicating a widespread outage rendering the platform inaccessible.
As per Downdetector, the platform received over 70,000 reports of users facing issues. Presently, there is no available information on the cause of this disruption. Some users noted peculiar behavior, reporting that they could view ads and their own tweets on their profiles. While users could search for specific profiles, the posts were conspicuously absent.
In response to the outage, concerned users turned to Facebook to share their experiences. Samuel Oseremen Imoisili expressed, “Please who uses X/twitter, seems the app is not working or someone should help me confirm.” Another Facebook user, Tony Thee Goon, humorously remarked, “My and my fellow twitter users retaining (returning) to Facebook. Since our app is down,” accompanied by a meme.
Interestingly, despite the outage, the Spaces feature on the app, which enables live streaming discussions, continued to function. Thousands of users congregated on Spaces to stay informed. Adding a touch of irony, the hashtag ‘TwitterDown’ trended on other platforms in the midst of the outage.
This incident marks a recurrence of outages for X. Previously, the Elon Musk-owned platform experienced downtime in both March and July of the current year. In July, Downdetector recorded over 13,000 instances of X being down in the US and the UK. Users encountered messages like “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again.”
Similarly, on March 6, the platform suffered a disruption for several hours. Users reported difficulties in normal usage, including problems accessing links, images, and videos. Thousands were affected, with reports from some regions indicating slower-than-usual website performance.