Social media platform X experienced widespread outages early on Thursday, December 20, affecting thousands of users around the world.

Peaking just before 6am GMT, thousands of users reported experiencing now-resolved issues on X, including problems in the UK, the US, and India. Between 5.30 am and 7am (GMT), there were over 70,000 reports of problems on the platform before a solution was found, according to data from Downdetector.com.

Both premium and free users of the platform faced issues loading their feeds, instead being greeted with a message “Waiting for posts”, rather than the usual flurry of posts. Some users were able to see notifications and share posts but were unable to load either the ‘Following’ page or the ”For You page.

X now reports all systems are operational on its status page and the platform appears to be working as usual in all regions.

Is X still down?

Account holders faced issues between 5.30am and 7am, reaching a peak just before 6am. However, this isn’t the first time the platform experienced problems.

Back in March, X experienced a similarly major outage, just after one of many rounds of layoffs that resulted in a drop of 200 employees. Much like December’s outage, users were faced with a blank welcome page, without the ability to see posts on the For You or Following pages.

People also complained they could not access links, images, or videos on the site, impacting their experience of scrolling through their feeds.

This was followed by another outage in July, where thousands of users reported being unable to see tweets, missing timelines, and the number of followers displayed on their account seemingly decreasing overnight. In many cases, these followers were reinstated once the outage was over.

Most recently in October, some X users were unable to log into their accounts, while others could access the platform but could only see empty feeds. In all cases, X was able to solve the issues within a few hours.

Featured image: Pexels

Rachael Davis