For more than 24 hours, many users on X have been encountering significant functionality problems. Some messages fail to load, timelines stall without updates, and posts only appear after refreshing the page multiple times.
Cause Traced to Data Center Outage
The issues began Thursday afternoon, with thousands reporting problems starting at 2:12 p.m. Eastern, according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage monitoring site. X’s official Engineering account confirmed the degraded performance was due to a data center outage and said the team was actively working to resolve the problem.
Wired reported that a fire broke out Thursday at an X-leased data center near Portland, Oregon, though it remains unclear if this incident directly caused the outages.
This is not the first major disruption for X. In March, users globally experienced sudden disconnections and issues accessing content. Elon Musk attributed that outage to a cyberattack without presenting evidence. Previous large-scale connectivity issues also occurred in December 2022, July 2023, and more recently, timelines briefly stopped updating in May.
Staff Cuts and Impact on Stability
Since Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of X (formerly Twitter) in 2022, the company’s workforce has been drastically reduced—from 7,500 employees to roughly 1,300 by early 2023, including only 550 full-time engineers. Another round of layoffs primarily affecting the engineering team occurred in November 2024.
The company has faced security misconfigurations that potentially left the platform vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks, raising concerns about the robustness of X’s infrastructure following the significant staff reductions.
What The Author Thinks
This ongoing instability highlights the dangers of aggressive cost-cutting and downsizing, especially in critical technical roles. While slashing staff might improve short-term finances, it risks long-term damage to service reliability and user trust. Platforms like X depend heavily on their engineering teams to maintain secure, high-performing systems, and neglecting this can lead to frequent outages and security vulnerabilities. Sustainable growth requires investing in infrastructure and personnel rather than undermining them.
