X Outage Hits Thousands Globally as Elon Musk’s “X Still Works” Post Quickly Backfires

Elon Musk-owned X faced a widespread outage on June 22, with thousands of users in the U.S., Canada, and the UK reporting issues. The disruption came shortly after Musk claimed “X still works” during a broader internet blackout, making the incident even more ironic.

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The Elon Musk-owned social media website X experienced an outage on Monday, June 22, whereby numerous users from various countries around the world could not access the site or use the features it provided. This was evident starting about 9:00 a.m. ET, which quickly spread around the globe, with users from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom facing difficulties accessing the social media. Even though it seemed like the website recovered later in the day, the outage caused huge debate on the internet, especially considering that it was right after Musk said, "X still works," when there was a general internet outage for many websites.

Based on the outage monitoring website Downdetector, the outages that occurred on the website X were experienced very fast within a short period of time. In the US, there were more than 25,000 reports recorded at the peak of the outage, which later dropped as the service started being fixed. In Canada, there were also many reports as they increased beyond 3,400. Also, there were more than 9,000 reports recorded in the United Kingdom. It should be noted that these figures are just reported from the users and Downdetector.

The thing that made the outage remarkable was its timing. Prior to that moment, there were reports of service disruption experienced by various internet services and platforms. Issues occurred with Amazon Web Services as well as other products provided by AWS, such as Prime Video and Alexa. Apart from that, Roblox, Reddit, Snapchat, and some banks have been affected. Right in the middle of that, Elon Musk posted on X stating that "X still works," making it clear that X is one of the platforms that were working fine despite all the problems happening online. It did not take long before the situation changed.

Just minutes after the post of Musk, X started having issues of its own. Complaints regarding X service started accumulating around 9:45 a.m., and soon the number of complaints increased significantly. According to some users, the service could not be accessed altogether, while others experienced partial service problems. Many users could not see their timelines, view profiles containing recent posts, and open media tabs on both desktop and mobile. Considering how important X is for real-time discussion and immediate access, any outage could affect its operation significantly.

A majority of the reported glitches seemed to arise from mobile devices, which implied that the application was likely among the most affected areas of the site. While some mentioned the receipt of error messages and broken timelines, others claimed that although they were able to access the app, they were not able to utilize crucial functions, like reading the replies, downloading media files, and even seeing their recent posts. Just like always happens during disruptions of such a magnitude on social media sites, users resorted to other sites and trackers to determine whether it was a wide-scale issue or just something wrong with their device alone.

There have been no explanations provided so far on the cause of the X shutdown. According to Reuters, SpaceX, which currently owns X, has refused to comment on the matter regarding the cause of the disruption. Thus, it is still unknown whether the outage was caused by server troubles, any bugs in the application itself, problems with the infrastructure, or an internet-based problem taking place simultaneously. In view of the fact that several websites experienced difficulties on the same day, there is inevitably curiosity about the nature of X’s outage.

The episode has once again shone the light of scrutiny on the platform's reliability, given that the company continues to be closely watched for technical issues and managerial decisions in the age of Musk. Given that the platform has seen an extensive amount of change since Musk took over Twitter and converted it into X, such as layoffs, infrastructural changes, and adjustments in moderation and verification policy, each outage can become an acid test for whether the platform can continue functioning seamlessly amid all these alterations.

Though the service was mostly brought back online within the same day, the situation could not help but draw attention. The fact that Musk posted "X still works" before the platform began experiencing difficulties soon turned into something of an object of ridicule. It goes without saying that in the world of social media where everything happens quickly, a perfectly regular problem may easily acquire viral potential, which is exactly what happened in the case in question due to the ironic nature of the earlier post.

The question of reliability becomes more urgent for users. Indeed, X continues to operate in real-time communications in all major news stories and other events such as sports and political issues. The fact that the platform fails in the middle of the day that has been plagued by many more issues with the Internet only adds fuel to the discussions about stability of services and dependence of many people on several platforms.

Currently, X seems to have returned to its operation mode, and there is not a lot of information about the problem on Twitter anymore. Nevertheless, the event can be considered as yet another point in favor of criticism that many large-scale social media sites are subject to, even in the case when their owner celebrates his victory too early.