X was down

Elon Musk’s X platform, previously known as Twitter, mostly stopped working for more than an hour. In mobile apps, the timelines wouldn’t refresh, and on the web, a placeholder message proclaimed, “Welcome to X! This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now.” The global internet trackers at Netblocks noted a “significant international outage” that wasn’t linked to any country-level blocks or filtering.

At about 1:35AM ET, shortly after this article was published, access to timelines was restored, although we haven’t heard what caused the problem.

Oddly, posting to the site still worked, even if the posts disappeared after a refresh, and accounts followed with notifications turned on still appeared in that feed, along with push notifications for new posts. There was even a Space hosted by New York Times reporter Ryan Mac, with over 800 people discussing the outage despite the inability to see new posts.

The blanked-out timelines also meant accounts for owner / CTO Elon Musk, Support, or X CEO Linda Yaccarino couldn’t display any useful information, and the API Status page for the service didn’t update to note any issues.

On DownDetector, reports of problems appear to have started just before 12:30AM ET, and so far, we’ve seen no indication of what might have caused the problem or how long it could take until service is restored.

This isn’t the only major outage for the site in recent days. Another issue broke outgoing links for a couple of hours last week. As usual, the platform’s PR account email responded only with an automatic “Busy now, please check back later” message, so anyone paying for Premium service (or hoping to be paid) will have to check elsewhere for news on its status.

Update December 21st, 1:50AM ET: Updated to note that service has been restored.