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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
World
Saqib Shah

X/Twitter down as users report global issues with social media platform

The platform formerly known as Twitter is down for users around the world.

X is currently suffering an outage that is stopping people from accessing it on the web and their phones.

The website tracking service DownDetector shows user reports of problems at X in the UK, US, France and Australia.

The issue appears to have started at 2pm UK time, with users being met with blank timelines on Thursday afternoon. 

At the time of writing, there were more than 1,300 user reports of problems at Twitter in the UK, over 3,200 in the US, and roughly 500 in France and Australia, respectively.

X has already gone down several times this year, including a major outage in March. It also stopped working for Android users in late January, and wouldn't load for general users twice in February.

The latest issue comes a day before the one year anniversary of Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter.

Musk has previously warned that Twitter is in dire financial straits and could go bankrupt as a result. After the dust settled on Musk's fraught buyout, Twitter reportedly had $13 billion in debt on its files.

Musk has tried to cut costs by laying off thousands of Twitter employees, while turning to subscriptions to bring in additional revenue.

The company recently began charging new users an annual fee of $1 to use some of its most basic features in New Zealand and the Philippines.

In July, Twitter briefly enforced a daily limit on the amount of tweets people could read. Musk said the change was designed to combat “extreme levels" of data scraping on the platform. It came after several hours of many users reporting that they could not refresh posts or see their timelines.

The latest change to X arrived on Wednesday, October 25, when the platform introduced the ability to make audio and video calls on iPhone. The feature is limited to paying subscribers, though anyone can receive calls.

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