Social media platform X back online after global outage

By John Besley, PA

Social media platform X, formerly Twitter, experienced a global outage on Thursday morning with users briefly unable to see their timelines.

Thousands of people took to the website Downdetector, which tracks online outages, to report issues with the platform’s app and website.

Almost 4,000 outage reports had been made to the site at 6am.

Some users attempting to log into their X accounts found their timelines empty, with the home page displaying only the message: “Welcome to X!”

However, users were still be able to post tweets, with the hashtag #TwitterDown starting to trend on the site within minutes of reports of the outages emerging, although those tweets could not be seen.

The outage lasted around 45 minutes before user timelines began to show as normal.

Billionaire Elon Musk took over the platform in a $44 billion (€40.1 billion) deal last autumn.