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Time to head to Bluesky?
Not surprisingly, many folks over on Bluesky are enjoying today’s X outage and are looking back at the smoking remains of Twitter with a degree of schadenfreude.
Bluesky has managed to establish itself as a genuine X alternative, with the maker of the popular Tweetbot app (which was shut down after Twitter banned third-party apps) recently announcing that it’s making an iOS and Mac app for the platform that’s aptly called Phoenix.
Some Bluesky fans have noted (below) that it’s been a particularly bad day for Elon Musk, with Tesla stock also down. And looking at Downdetector, the X problems don’t seem to be easing…
‘Something went wrong’
Ever the master of understatement, X is greeting many users (my US colleagues in particular) with error messages like ‘something went wrong’ or simply a blank screen.
Some have taken to (other) social media platforms like Reddit to exclaim that this is actually an improvement to their lives. But here in the UK, X is back (for me at least) with its usual mix of Elon Musk ramblings, AI-generated memes and Fessholes.
This latest outage has fallen short of the second one earlier today at around 10am ET / 2pm GMT, but it is still pretty widespread. There’s still no official word from X on the cause of today’s wobbles, but presumably Grok is working on it…
When did this latest X outage start?
This is very much a global X / Twitter outage, with reports of problems climbing fast in the US and UK from around 10.50am ET / 2.50pm GMT on the site Downdetector.
They’ve just hit a peak of 30,000 reports in the US, which is a massive outage. In the UK, reports have fallen in the past hour, but are still hovering at the 4,700 mark.
So, what’s causing the problems? While there’s been nothing official, some cybersecurity commentators suggest it may be a so-called DDOS (or Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks, where a flood of internet traffic overwhelms a server.
In other words, buckle up – because this could last a while…
