X, formerly Twitter, is currently in the midst of a rollout of its biggest ever performance problems across its platform, starting on Thursday afternoon. Users have been experiencing a variety of other bugs, including the inability to sign in and absence of their direct messages in particular. These disruptions are now extending past the 24-hour mark. This has rendered the site’s most basic functionality unusable for most users, including top national reporters.
That new wave of challenges follows an extremely tumultuous period at the top of the company. In November 2024, X kicked off another wave of layoffs, this time focusing their impact in engineering. This trend began with Elon Musk’s irresponsible purchase of the platform for $44 billion in 2022. He presided over an equally dramatic slashing of the ranks, from 7,500 employees down to roughly 1,300. As of January 2023, X had just 550 engineers on full-time staff to tackle any technical challenges from to do so.
Beyond staffing issues, X has been accused of security malpractice since Musk’s takeover. News reports have suggested that denial-of-service attacks could have brought the platform down due to misconfigured servers. This development comes after Musk attributed a previous disruption to an unverified cyberattack, raising concerns about the company’s transparency regarding outages.
These recent performance issues are reminiscent of earlier connectivity troubles faced by users in December 2022 and July 2023. Additionally, as we discussed back in May, for many heavy users, their timelines began to not update at all. A summer of alarming technical failures has raised concerns about X’s capacity to provide a dependable service. These worries come amid a backdrop of continued layoffs and leadership turnover.
“X is aware some of our users are experiencing performance issues on the platform today. We are experiencing a data center outage and the team is actively working to remediate the issue.” – Engineering (@XEng)
Moreover, a fire at an X-leased data center in Umatilla, Oregon, turned things up a notch. While the company strives to resolve these issues, thousands of users have submitted reports detailing their challenges, highlighting the growing dissatisfaction with the platform’s reliability.
The last major service disruption struck in March. This incident is just the latest in a deeply worrying trend of widespread, serious outages that have afflicted X since Musk’s takeover. The firm continues to struggle. Its leadership and direction, as well as its ability to retain users and maintain trust, are now under intense scrutiny.
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