Kate Mills 
Dec 21, 2023
The rebranded social media giant, X, formerly recognised as Twitter, grappled with a widespread outage that lasted approximately an hour on Thursday.
Users engaged on the X platform, now under Elon Musk's ownership, encountered a disruption hindering their access to regular posts and timelines. Instead, they were greeted with a "Welcome to X!" message, disrupting their usual social media activities.
Whats going on with Twitter
DownDetector, a web outage tracking site, indicated a notable surge in reports around 12:40am ET Thursday, registering complaints across the app and website interfaces. In the United States, over 74,000 individuals reported issues, while nearly 7,000 users in the UK filed similar reports. DownDetector aggregates outage statuses from user-submitted reports on its platform, alongside data from various sources, including Twitter.
X, a social media platform that enables users to share text, photos, and videos as "posts" (previously known as tweets) with their followers, underwent a significant transformation after Musk's acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion.
The platform underwent a rebranding to X, ushering in substantial changes, including staff layoffs, alterations in moderation and verification policies, and the readmission of previously banned extremist accounts. However, despite these alterations, X's reliance on advertising as a primary revenue stream has shown a decline following Musk's takeover.
