X Has Experienced An Outage, Here’s Why

X feeds froze and timelines refused to load from about 9 pm BST. DownDetector recorded more than 5 000 user complaints within minutes. X’s Engineering Team tweeted, “X is aware some of our users are experiencing performance issues on the platform today.

“We are experiencing a data centre outage and the team is actively working to remediate the issue.”

No follow up appeared for the rest of the night, and the fault count eased only slowly. In earlier disruptions, many users could still read posts. This time even basic page refreshes stalled, showing the depth of the failure.

Reports of the outage came from Europe, North America and Asia, pointing to a worldwide problem rather than a local glitch. At first the slowdown looked like the heavy traffic hiccups that pop up during major events, but the numbers kept climbing.

By midnight, large parts of the network were unreachable, leaving users to swap updates on rival platforms.

The Engineering post did not mention any timetable for a fix. That silence angered advertisers who were trying to manage live campaigns and track spending as the blackout spread across time zones.

 

Why Did The Backup Plan Fail So Quickly?

 

Big social networks usually split traffic across several server hubs so that if one fails, another picks up the slack. X once followed that practice, but plans drawn up in 2022 changed the picture.

Platformer reported that December that X would shut its Sacramento data centre and cut capacity in Atlanta. Former staff predicted trouble, warning that hard-coded links still pointed at the closing site.

With Sacramento gone, most traffic now lands on a single campus near Portland, Oregon. When that hub stumbles, there is little room for detours. Wednesday’s crash showed exactly that. Once Oregon went offline, requests had nowhere else to go, and log in prompts simply timed out.

Engineers inside the company may have tried to flip traffic to cloud partners at Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Platformer reported earlier that owner Elon Musk has pushed to renegotiate those contracts to save money. Any cutback in cloud space makes emergency handovers slower and more cramped.

Plans to strip weight out of the server fleet came at the same time as bold promises of high-resolution video, which demands more storage and bandwidth. The mismatch has left the platform trying to do more with less.

 

 

Did A Fire Make Things Even Worse?

 

While the official note cited only a data centre fault, Wired later reported that a fire broke out on Wednesday at the Hillsboro facility leased by Musk. The blaze started in the afternoon local time, the same window that DownDetector saw complaints spike.

Neither X nor the landlord confirmed a link between flames and downtime. Still, if smoke damaged power units or network switches, traffic would stop within seconds. With no second home for that traffic, the outage rippled across the globe.

Fire crews left the scene before midnight, but X feeds stayed unstable long after. That lag points to deeper damage than a quick reboot can cure.

 

How Does This Breakdown Compare With Past Instances?

 

The latest fault is the second big outage this spring. In March 2025 the site froze for hours. Musk at the time blamed a “massive cyberattack”, but security researchers later traced the freeze to weak server safeguards inside X.

More publicised belt tightening began in 2022 and every failure since then has grown larger. Each blackout feeds user doubts and leaves advertisers wondering if their campaigns will reach anyone. Musk’s promise of leaner operations has come at the cost of resilience.

Early Thursday DownDetector still logged new complaints, though far fewer than the evening peak. Many users could scroll text again, yet uploads failed and notifications lagged, showing that full recovery was still pending.

 

What Does The Outage Mean For Users And Marketers?

 

Regular users grow weary of blank pages. Each breakdown nudges them toward rival apps that seldom stall. If the trend continues, daily traffic could drop enough to hurt revenue targets.

For marketers, stability is a must. Missed impressions translate into wasted budget. A single night of downtime can derail a global product launch, and brands have long memories.

Unless X restores redundancy, both hardware and skilled staff, the platform risks more blackouts and a slow drift of advertising cash to steadier networks.