• by Colin Kirkland , December 21, 2023

Early Thursday morning, X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter experienced a global outage that lasted for over an hour. The outage left over 77,000 users in the U.S. and 7,000 users in Canada and the U.K. facing issues on X and X Pro, according to web monitoring tool DownDetector.

While the cause of the outage is still unknown, users were not able to view tweets -- they vanished from timelines and profiles -- but could see notifications and use Spaces, according to complaints reported by DownDetector, as well as complaints made by users who flocked to Meta's X-rival app Threads during the outage.

Because of the blank timelines, potentially helpful information from X's owner Elon Musk, the support staff and X CEO Linda Yaccarino could not be displayed on the app. In addition, the platform’s API Status page wasn’t able to update and note ongoing issues.

X has faced several outages since Musk's takeover in late 2022. In July of that year, about 50,000 users were met with system error messages, such as “rate limit exceeded” and “cannot retrieve tweets.”

With Threads releasing new features, onboarding more users in the EU, and testing the option to make the social messaging app interoperable via integrations with Mastodon and other apps that use the ActivityPub protocol, major technical issues like this one (not to mention ongoing content moderation issues) could drive more X users to the rival app over time.