Online Reporter
LONDON- X had a bad day on Monday but it appears the situation is now better.
The social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, has had a very rough Monday, with users reporting four outages in one day.
The first spike in reported problems on Downdetector happened at about 10am ET in the United States, with X users in both the US and UK unable to get their usual fix of memes and outrage in the app or website.
While the first outage was quickly resolved, X went down two more times.
So to quote X’s own tagline “what’s happening”?
Elon Musk claimed that “there was a massive cyberattack against X”, which was “done with a lot of resources”.
So that would explain why X continued to have major issues over eight hours on from when they started. There has been a steady decrease in reported outages on Downdetector and we have seen the site rebound to typical usage in the hours since.
A timeline of the outages:
MIDNIGHT GMT
This is very much a global X / Twitter outage, with reports of problems climbing fast in the US and UK. They hit a peak of 30,000 reports in the US, which is a massive outage.
In the UK, reports fell but but still hovered at the 4,700 mark.
So, what was causing the problems?
Some cybersecurity commentators suggested it might be a so-called DDOS (or Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack, where a flood of internet traffic overwhelms a server.
00.20 GMT
Ever the master of understatement, X greeted many users with error messages like ‘something went wrong’ or simply a blank screen.
Some took to other social media platforms like Reddit to exclaim that this was actually an improvement to their lives.
X was back in the UK with its usual mix of Elon Musk ramblings, AI-generated memes and Fessholes.
00.30 GMT
Not surprisingly, many folks over on Bluesky were enjoying X outage and are looking back at the smoking remains of Twitter with a degree of schadenfreude.
Bluesky has managed to establish itself as a genuine X alternative, with the maker of the popular Tweetbot app (which was shut down after Twitter banned third-party apps) recently announcing that it’s making an iOS and Mac app for the platform that’s aptly called Phoenix.
Some Bluesky fans have noted that it’s been a particularly bad day for Musk, with Tesla stock also down. And looking at Downdetector, the X problems don’t seem to be easing. − techradar.com
