X Platform Suffers Brief Outage, Leaving Thousands Stranded

Social media platform X, formerly Twitter, encountered a significant outage early Saturday, May 24, 2025, rendering the service inaccessible for thousands of users across the United States and beyond. The disruption, which began around 8:00 a.m. ET, impacted both the mobile app and website, with users reporting server connection errors and login failures. By 11:30 a.m. ET, the situation showed signs of improvement, with reported issues dropping to under 700, though some users continued to experience intermittent problems.

Unraveling the Cause

The outage’s origins trace back to Thursday, February 20, 2025, when issues first emerged around 2:00 p.m. ET, according to real-time web monitoring data. X’s engineering team pinpointed the cause as a data center outage, potentially linked to a fire at a leased facility in Hillsboro, Oregon, on Thursday morning. While the platform reported the site-wide outage as resolved by Friday, login issues persisted, with ongoing “degraded performance” noted in developer updates. An update posted by X’s engineering team at 8:03 p.m. ET on Friday assured users that round-the-clock efforts were underway to restore full functionality.

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Global Reach of the Disruption

The outage extended beyond the U.S., with over 11,000 users in the United Kingdom and hundreds in other countries reporting difficulties. Real-time data highlights user complaints of slow load times, error messages, and complete service unavailability. As monitoring services rely on user reports, the true scale of the disruption may be underrepresented, suggesting a broader impact on X’s global user base.

Did You Know?
X’s transition to xAI ownership in March 2025 aligns with its push to integrate advanced AI technologies, including Grok 3, a conversational AI accessible on X’s mobile apps and website.

Musk Signals Urgent Reforms

Elon Musk, who acquired X in 2022 and transferred its ownership to xAI in March 2025, addressed the outage in a Saturday morning post. Responding to concerns about the data center fire, Musk admitted that failover redundancy systems underperformed, underscoring the need for “urgent operational enhancements.” He reaffirmed his commitment to X, xAI, and Tesla, noting a return to a 24/7 work schedule to oversee critical updates. X has not provided further comment on the matter.

Path to Recovery

X’s engineering team continues to tackle residual issues, with real-time updates indicating that most services are now operational, though some users may still face disruptions. The incident follows a March 2025 outage attributed to a “massive cyberattack,” highlighting ongoing challenges for the platform. With an average of 250 million daily active users, X remains a cornerstone of global social media, making its stability critical.