Twitter Suffers Outage In U.S. Affecting Web Users

Are you having trouble accessing X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter? You’re not alone. Tens of thousands of users in the U.S. have reported problems that seem to have started around 7:06 p.m. ET.

The problems with X seem to mostly be occurring with people who access the site from the website as opposed to the smartphone app, according to Down Detector. Users are being greeted with a message that reads, “Something went wrong. Try reloading.” Reloading doesn’t seem to help, according to my own tests.

X has suffered from various technical problems in recent months that have included users being unable to load the site. The social media platform even put a cap on users who were stopped from using the site after reading just 600 tweets. That was cap was soon raised and doesn’t appear to be a serious problem anymore.

X owner Elon Musk bought Twitter back in October 2022 and made a number of drastic changes, including firing thousands of people. Some tech experts warned at the time that getting rid of so much staff risked causing the site to experience outages, though it’s not clear what’s causing the current downtime.

Musk has also courted controversy on the site by making inflammatory statements that have reportedly scared advertisers. The billionaire owner recently said ad revenue has declined by roughly 50% since he took over and it’s not clear what might be done to fix that in the near term.

Musk hired Linda Yaccarino to take over as CEO in June during an effort to calm advertiser worries, but it remains to be seen how successful that move may have been since Musk remains the central focus of power users on the site.

X did not respond to questions emailed on Monday night. I’ll update this post if I hear back.