Global Social networking platform the X (formerly Twitter) experienced an extensive global downtime today with millions of users looking in unending loading screen and a frozen feed. The problem, which started at around 3:00 5:37 pm GMT rapidly escalated with reports coming into Europe, North America, Asia, and India.

What Happened?

According to the real-time monitor Downdetector reports of outages were at their peak within 30 minutes after the initial interruption. People complained that they were not able access or open timelines, post tweets or be able to access their DMs. The mobile application and the web version appear to both be affected.

X hasn’t released an official statement as of yet but its Status Dashboard confirmed “elevated error rates,” suggesting that a error on the server or a malfunction might be at fault.

 External Sources: The Verge – A widespread outage of service for X

Users React, Hashtag Trends

The hashtags #XNotLoading and #TwitterDown started trend globally on other platforms, including Reddit as well as Threads. Some were mocking”the “death of doomscrolling,” some expressed concerns over the loss of access to the latest news and public alerts as well as social interactions on the platform.

The outage also affected applications and services from third parties that use the X API, further increasing the effect of the downtime.

 External source: TechCrunch – X confirms issue affecting global access

Not the First Time

This isn’t the only time that X has been in darkness during Elon Musk’s direction. Numerous similar issues were reported in 2023 and 2024. They were often blamed on modifications to the infrastructure and a frenzied platform update.

With the increasing dependence on the platform to provide immediate information the latest incident demonstrates the weaknesses of digital services that are centralized.