On Friday, X faced an enormous outage that took the platform’s services completely offline for most users throughout the United States. The event would be the second such outage in the span of just one week. Just a few days prior, on Tuesday, January 13, more than 24,000 users experienced trouble using the platform. Users in large markets including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Seattle experienced more significant problems. They shared issues they encountered, from feeds lacking content to the platform not loading all the way.
At the time of publication, the cause of Friday’s outage is still unknown. Over 50% of all reported problems were directly linked to the mobile app. This has hit hard on users who depend on their phones to use the platform. Users reported only a few posts loading or having the entire service fail to load.
This downtime itself impacted a large diverse swath of users who rely on X for communication and broadcasting information. By 2 p.m. ET on Friday, those conditions started to turn the other way. The next year, the count of reports about X problems fell all the way down to about 1,000.
“This morning, I couldn’t see any of my feed, and posting didn’t work at all,” expressed a frustrated user from Los Angeles. As the fractures and failures continued to pile up, users went to social media to complain about everything going wrong. Their sentiments rang true on Zoom and Council chambers alike.
This most recent disruption continues a troubling pattern for X. As in previous years, they have run into major problems with their internet infrastructure troll, Cloudflare. In recent months, Cloudflare’s worked to erase outages on a few platforms at once, so it was with LinkedIn and Fortnite and DoorDash dealings too. These problems have led to questions about the reliability of the services that are now based on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
The timing of this latest outage is notable given that it comes just days after another major nationwide network failure, this time suffered by Verizon. The glitch left hundreds of thousands of Verizon customers with their phones frozen on SOS mode. It knocked out 911 calls across several states, resulting in intense public outcry over the carrier’s response to the crisis.
After more than a month of frequent back-end outages, users are understandably worried about the fragility of X’s remaining services. What’s clear is that the problems from January 13 were completely fixed within an hour. After Friday’s issues, questions have emerged about the ways future outages could severely affect people’s access to essential communication channels.
