Last updated on February 22nd, 2024 at 12:21 pm

On Thursday, thousands of users reported being unable to access the social media platform for more than an hour

The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has been restored after experiencing a global outage on Thursday.

The issue reportedly began after 5 am UK time, and its cause is still unknown.

Thousands of users reported being unable to access the site properly. Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, recorded over 30,000 reports about the site and app between 5 am and 7 am in the UK, and more than 260,000 in the US during the same period, with the majority occurring between 5:30 am and 6:30 am.

Users on X encountered difficulties viewing posts, instead receiving a “Welcome to X!” message. Users of X Pro, formerly known as Tweetdeck, saw a message that said “Waiting for posts”.

Elon Musk acquired the platform in a $44 billion (£33.6 billion) deal last autumn.

Users with access shared memes about the outage under the hashtag #TwitterDown, with many imagining Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg celebrating.

NetBlocks, a company that monitors internet disruption, reported a “significant international outage” on X, with timelines not loading and posts failing. The incident was said to be unrelated to “country-level internet disruptions or filtering”.

Since Musk’s takeover, attempts to contact X’s press team have resulted in automatic replies. Initially, these replies were in the form of a poo emoji, but on Thursday, the auto response read: “Busy now, please check back later”.

The site has experienced multiple glitches since Musk took over in October 2022. The workforce was reduced from 7,500 to about 2,000 within six months of Musk’s arrival.

Engineers responsible for fixing and preventing service outages were among the thousands of employees who lost their jobs. One former engineer who resigned soon after the initial round of redundancies at the company said they quit because they would have been “on call constantly with little support for an indeterminate amount of time on several additional complex systems I had no experience in”.

Warnings about the standard of X’s IT infrastructure precede Musk’s takeover. In July 2022, the former head of security at then-Twitter, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging “extreme, egregious deficiencies by Twitter in every area of his mandate”.

The complaint claimed there was an incident in spring 2021 when a shutdown looked imminent that could have left the platform offline for “weeks, months or permanently”.