If X Isn’t Working, It’s Not Just You
If you try to access X on a Friday afternoon (Eastern Time), you may hit a roadblock. This is what happened to me: I went to refresh my feed one last time before leaving for the weekend, but I noticed that nothing was loading. In fact, the site acted as if I had a brand new account and invited me to explore users to follow. But every time I clicked on something I just got errors.
I thought maybe it was on my side, because when I checked Downdetector, the site said: “User reports show no current issues with X (Twitter).” Indeed, the chart was flat, except for a small spike earlier in the day. But the comments were filled with users talking about how dysfunctional the site was, confirming that I wasn’t alone here. (Disclosure: ZiffDavis owns both Lifehacker and Downdetector.)
What do you think of it so far?
X has experienced many similar downtime cases, so in all likelihood the site will be back up and running soon. (It might even be the case by the time you read this.) But this comes at the same time that competitor X, Bluesky, experienced service outages due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This could be a coincidence, but in Bluesky’s case the problem was not a bug, but rather an attacker flooding Bluesky’s servers with too much traffic to function.
