Elon Musk’s social media platform, X (formerly known as Twitter), experienced a major outage Friday afternoon, significantly impacting users in the U.S. This outage, which lasted for several hours, added to the challenges Musk faces as his $44 billion investment in X appears increasingly precarious.
The incident began around 2:30 PM ET, with users unable to access the platform or use its services, leading to a spike in complaints on outage monitoring sites like Downdetector.
As the outage continued into the afternoon, over 50,000 reports from dissatisfied users were recorded, with most problems concentrated in the eastern United States. Initially, the technical difficulties appeared to affect larger metropolitan areas along the East Coast, but the most significant issues were identified in major cities in the Midwest, including Dallas, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Additionally, users in other locations such as Atlanta, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York reported difficulty logging into or accessing the platform’s features.
For many, this latest incident has highlighted the ongoing challenges Musk has encountered in managing X. Within hours, the outage resulted in the loss of millions of dollars in the platform’s value and heightened concerns about the long-term sustainability of Musk’s $44 billion acquisition in 2020.
Although the platform’s share price remained stable at around $43 per share on the day of the statement, the potential long-term impact on the company’s reputation could be much more profound. As the outage continued, X users’ frustration escalated.
Many turned to alternative social media platforms to express their dissatisfaction, with some directly criticizing Musk for the irony of the world’s richest individual fighting the service he acquired for a staggering $44 billion. One particularly disgruntled user tweeted: “Elon is literally the richest man alive and still can’t keep his D*Mn website running, do your job.”
In addition to the inconvenience of not being able to access their accounts, numerous X users feared they had been banned from the platform, only to encounter error messages indicating they weren’t authorized to use the service. This confusion led users to speculate that they had somehow violated the platform’s policies, only to later discover that the outage was more extensive than initially perceived.
