On Thursday evening, millions of X users found themselves unable to post links. One can only imagine the worry they felt when their timelines went dark, ceasing all updates. Many of you were still feeling the pain. Others, according to reports, had not been notified by the platform since approximately 10 p.m. the previous evening.
The recent outage follows a troubling history for X, which has experienced multiple large-scale connectivity problems over the past year. A notable outage occurred in March 2024 when users worldwide were abruptly disconnected from the service, facing difficulties accessing feeds, sending messages, and engaging with content.
As of January 2023, X had approximately 550 full-time engineers on staff. That’s a stunning drop from the 7,500 staff it once had when Elon Musk purchased the firm – then often known as Twitter – for $44 billion in 2022. The workforce was immediately cut by roughly 80% to just 1,300 employees in the wake of Musk’s takeover. In November 2024, the company announced a second round of layoffs focused largely on its engineering department.
Users flocked to X’s unofficial subreddit to voice their frustrations over the bug that appeared to be killing notifications and updating users on their timeline. One user shared, “No notifications since about 10 p.m. last night here in Germany!” highlighting the widespread nature of the problem. Another user noted their attempt to resolve the issue by uninstalling and reinstalling the app, stating, “I thought that uninstalling and reinstalling the app would work (it didn’t).”
Elon Musk blamed these disruptions on a cyberattack, though he later lacked any supporting evidence for this accusation. Users began having problems with their timeline starting at 6 p.m. Eastern time on May 8. These issues went unaddressed for at least 15 hours straight.
This most recent issue adds to the connectivity issues that X has faced in the last year. Significant problems occurred in December 2022 and July 2023. These repeated outages have pushed users to seriously consider the platform’s reliability and whether they’ll be able to continue communicating without interruption.