Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, bought Twitter in October 2022 and renamed it to X before firing about 80% of the company’s workforce.
WASHINGTON — X.com, the Elon Musk-owned social media platform, appears to be back after suffering a widespread outage affecting the entire site worldwide.
Users accessing the site were being greeted with spinning loading wheels across all portions of the site, including their feed and the trending topics sidebar. Eventually, users’ feeds were returning a simple error: “Something went wrong. Try reloading.”
According to website uptime-tracking site Downdetector, the issues began around 5:30 a.m. Eastern, when users first began reporting issues logging on to twitter. Over the next half hour, reports to Downdetector spiked as nearly 23,000 users reported issues.
By 6:15 a.m., the issue appeared to have resolved, with users being able to see their feeds again. X did not provide a reason for the outage on the company’s account.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, bought Twitter in October 2022 and renamed it to X. Musk proceeded to fire about 80% of the company’s workforce, reducing its headcount from around 7,500 to roughly 1,500 employees.
Musk is now taking similar approaches to government, as he heads the DOGE unit under President Donald Trump in an effort to curtail waste and spending across the federal government.
He used a similar tactic with the federal government as he did when he acquired Twitter: requiring justification of work.
Last month, Musk sent an email to all federal employees requiring them to provide a list of five things they did the previous week, at risk of being fired. The email is similar to one he sent once taking over Twitter, shortly before cutting major parts of the company’s staff.
