It wasn't on the scale of a certain cellular outage, but X (formerly Twitter) was down for many users today.
For a while, thousands of users found that both the site and mobile app were failing to load for them, with the former accompanied by a 'Something went wrong' notice.
The spikes in reported outages on DownDetector started to rise as of 10:15am ET, reaching over 78,000 in the United States at their peak. At the same time, reports for Grok began spiking, reaching around 2,200.
TechRadar reported live on the outage, which fortunately fizzled out for most by around 11.45am / 4.45pm GMT. Here's how it played out...
While X was down for me initially, it came back, and then went away again. And it seems that's the case as of now for many of my TechRadar colleagues in both the US and the UK – they still can't get X to load as a whole, with the timeline not loading, and trending terms on the side.
Down Detector reports show a slight recovery, and then a spike of outages
Down Detector reports show it's likely the case for many: X went down, causing the initial spike, slightly recovered, and then hit problems again. As of the last update at 10:42 AM ET, there are over 53,000 reports of issues with using X.
Interestingly, my colleague Lance Ulanoff was able to post, but it took a while to appear on his profile.
On mobile – specifically the X app for iOS – in the UK, my colleague, TechRadar's Mark Wilson, is seeing a timeline with 'Posts aren't loading right now' at the top with a selection of older posts appearing underneath.
In the US, I'm not seeing the error up top, but the timeline below is not updated with recent posts; all are dated several hours ago.
On desktop here in the United States, X appears back for me, with the timeline loading and trending topics on the side, showing fairly recent posts. The first post is less than an hour old, but it's a bit slow to access different aspects of the site.
I've heard from colleagues in the US and the UK that it's a bit slow, but it is loading and getting closer to normal usage levels.
Considering many of the posts appearing in our timelines are from over an hour ago, or in some cases longer, it does appear that X is playing catch-up and is in recovery mode.
Down Detector reports are steadily dropping as well, currently sitting at under 8,000 reports as of 11:02 AM ET. Let us know in the comments down below if you're able to access X again and see more recent posts.
X seems to be back for most
Fortunately, it seems today's X outage is just a short-lived blip – with the site working fine for us, and reports on Downdetector dropping to around 6,000 in the US and only around 1,000 in the UK.
There's been no official explanation of what happened on the official X account, and we're unlikely to get one now given the issues lasted barely an hour. Let the memes re-commence...
