On Thursday night, many users of X, the social network owned by billionaire Elon Musk, began experiencing issues with their timelines. Specifically, timelines stopped updating, leaving users unable to see new posts from accounts they follow.
Numerous reports indicate that notifications also ceased functioning. Affected users are not receiving alerts about new activity from the accounts they follow. This issue has impacted both mobile and web versions of X, and switching devices or browsers appears to have no effect. Even subscribing to X Premium does not resolve the problem. This reporter, too, has not seen any updates to their timeline in over 15 hours, with the last visible activity occurring around 6 p.m. Eastern on May 8.
Server-Side Bug Suspected
The outage seems to be the result of a server-side bug. Users across different platforms report consistent behavior—timelines remain frozen, and notifications are missing. The problem does not appear to be limited to any one device or app version.
User Reports and Community Reactions
Downdetector, a service that tracks the real-time status of various platforms, recorded a sharp increase in reported X outages over the past 24 hours. On Reddit, several discussions about the broken notification system emerged overnight.
“No notifications since about 10 p.m. last night here in Germany!” one user wrote on X’s unofficial subreddit. Another user responded, “I thought that uninstalling and reinstalling the app would work (it didn’t).”
History of Outages
This іs not the first major disruption X has faced. In March, the platform experienced a significant outage that affected users globally. During that incident, users were disconnected from the platform and faced issues accessing feeds, messaging, and engaging with posts. Elon Musk attributed the disruption tо a cyberattack, although nо evidence was provided.
Prior large-scale outages also occurred іn December 2022 and July 2023, highlighting ongoing instability оn the platform.
Workforce Reductions After Musk’s Acquisition
After Elon Musk acquired the platform, formerly known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022, he initiated significant layoffs. The workforce was reduced by approximately 80%, from 7,500 employees to around 1,300. According to CNBC, only 550 full-time engineers remained as of January 2023. Another wave of layoffs took place in November 2024, largely impacting the engineering team.
