NetBlocks, a company that monitors internet disruption, said X had experienced a “significant international outage” with timelines not loading and posts failing. It said the incident was not related to “country-level internet disruptions or filtering”.
Since the takeover by Musk, attempts to contact X’s press team are met with automatic replies. Initially, these were in the form of a poo emoji but on Thursday the auto response read: “Busy now, please check back later”. The site has had multiple glitches since the billionaire businessman took over in October 2022.
The workforce was cut from 7,500 to about 2,000 within six months of Musk’s arrival.
Engineers responsible for fixing and preventing service outages were among the thousands of employees who lost their jobs.
One former engineer who resigned soon after the initial round of redundancies at the company said they quit because they would have been “on call constantly with little support for an indeterminate amount of time on several additional complex systems I had no experience in”.
Warnings about the standard of X’s IT infrastructure precede Musk’s takeover. In July 2022, the former head of security at then-Twitter, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging “extreme, egregious deficiencies by Twitter in every area of his mandate”.
The complaint claimed there was an incident in spring 2021 when a shutdown looked imminent that could have left the platform offline for “weeks, months or permanently”.
The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has been restored after a global outage on Thursday, reports 'The Guardian'.
The problem reportedly began after 5am UK time and its cause is not yet known.
Thousands of users reported that they were unable to access the site properly. The website Downdetector, which tracks online outages, logged more than 30,000 reports about the site and app between 5am and 7am in the UK and more than 260,000 in the US over the same timeframe, with most being registered between 5.30am and 6.30am.
Users on X were unable to view posts, instead receiving a “Welcome to X!” message. Users of X Pro, formerly Tweetdeck, had a message that said “Waiting for posts”.
Elon Musk took over the platform in a $44bn (£33.6bn) deal last autumn.
Under the hashtag #TwitterDown, users with access shared memes about the outage, many imagining the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg celebrating.
Over 77,000 US users faced access issues with X and X Pro, according to Downdetector data. With no way to post on X, social media users published updates about the outage on rivals including Facebook, Threads, and Reddit, as well as Meta’s rival app, Threads.
Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.
X is currently facing multiple headwinds, including an EU probe under a law designed to combat disinformation and hate, criticism of the platform’s response to recent rioting in Dublin, and an exodus of big-name advertisers.
Elon Musk’s company is now worth less than half of the $44 billion he paid for it in October 2022, according to internal documents sent to staff and reported by tech publication The Verge. The $44 billion acquisition lead to several layoffs, including those of numerous engineers responsible for fixing and preventing service outages, sources have previously told Reuters.
Did Musk kill Twitter by slowly making it useless for those who relied on it for real-time information ??
When Elon Musk first took over Twitter, those of us in the tech media had all kinds of theories about how the acquisition might bring about the death of the 17-year-old platform.
Some posited that his inept attempts at cost-cutting would cause irreparable damage to Twitter’s infrastructure or that mass resignations would lead to catastrophic instability. But as is so often the case with Musk, predictions were in vain. Twitter did die this year, but the way it played out was both more boring and more stupid than anyone could have possibly imagined.
Musk killed Twitter by slowly making it useless for those who relied on it for real-time information, by choking off conversations from those not willing to pay, by flooding users’ timelines with spammy blue-check sycophants and renaming the company X. He killed it by re-platforming actual Nazis and far-right trolls and Alex Jones and boosting anti-semitism so loudly the site's largest remaining advertisers and most prominent users abandoned the platform in droves. Though you can still go to www.twitter.com and see a website that vaguely resembles the thing we used to call Twitter, it’s only a dull echo of what it once was.
related link :: How Twitter died....
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