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X is back after an apparent widespread outage

Feeds aren’t loading on X following a reported data center fire earlier in the week.

Feeds aren’t loading on X following a reported data center fire earlier in the week.

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Image: The Verge
Wes Davis
is a former weekend editor who covered tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.

X is back up for most users after what appeared to be a significant outage that spiked early this morning around 9AM ET.

Global internet monitor NetBlocks posted this morning that X “has been experiencing international outages for some users for a second time in a week,” adding that the issue isn’t “related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering.” Downdetector showed complaints of an outage rose sharply after 8AM ET before beginning to fall about 45 minutes later. As of this writing, those reports have dropped from tens of thousands of reports to only hundreds.

Screenshot of Downdetector, showing a spike in outage reports at X.
Screenshot: Downdetector

Elsewhere on social media, people had been complaining about issues with the network for a couple of days — one of the top posts on the r/Twitter Reddit community is a screenshot of an error message on the X login screen, with many replies complaining about login issues. The X developer platform site’s incident history log shows that a sitewide outage started Thursday and lasted roughly a day. At the moment, there’s still an error message on the platform status page that reads, “Login with X (OAuth) and other X platform login flows are experiencing degraded performance.”

The issue comes after a fire reportedly broke out in an Oregon data center owned by X on Thursday morning. Wired writes that multiple unnamed sources told it that the fire, which forced “an extended response from emergency crews,” involved batteries in one of the data center’s rooms. Following reports of the fire, there were complaints that X was down, but the outage then seemed comparatively small.

X did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

Update May 24th: Outage reports have mostly subsided.

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