If X Doesn’t Work, It’s Not Just You.
If you’re trying to access X on Friday afternoon (Eastern Time), you might have encountered a problem. The same thing happened to me: I refreshed my feed one last time before leaving for the weekend, but I noticed nothing was loading. In fact, the site acted as if I had a brand new account and offered to show me users to follow. But every time I clicked on anything, I got errors.
I thought I might be the only one having this problem, because when I checked Downdetector , the site showed, “User reports indicate there are currently no issues with X (Twitter).” Indeed, the graph was flat, except for a small spike early today. But the comments were full of user reports of the site being down, confirming I wasn’t alone in this issue. (Note: ZiffDavis owns Lifehacker and Downdetector.)
X has experienced similar outages before, so in all likelihood, the site will be back online soon. (It might even be back online by the time you read this.) But this is happening at the same time that X’s competitor, Bluesky, experienced outages due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. This may be a coincidence, but in Bluesky’s case, the problem wasn’t a bug—instead, the attacker overloaded Bluesky’s servers with too much traffic, causing them to malfunction.