Elon Musk‘s X/Twitter is back up after going down tonight all over the world.
The usually reactive owner of the struggling social media platform hasn’t said anything about what happened or why, but for users it was certainly like someone pulled the plug for nearly an hour late Wednesday.
Detected by Downdector just before 10 pm PT, the site went almost dormant with no feeds, no posts, and not much of anything expect the likes of #MyTwitter, #NotTwitter, Did Elon, and #TwitterDown trending. Jumping on the site or app, most X/Twitter users saw this late tonight:
Clicking that “Let’s Go” didn’t really take users anywhere.
At around 11 pm PT, the platform appeared to be functioning normally (as normal as normal can be for X/Twitter of late). Again, no explanation of what happened from either X or Musk – at least not yet. Though the sentiment expressed by Warcraft director Duncan Jones was pretty indicative of the mockery of Musk that most were unloading once X/Twitter started working again and they realized all their posts and timelines hadn’t been deleted:
Rebranded X by Musk on July 22 and bedeviled by outages on several occasions since, the site formerly known as Twitter has suffered a loss of advertisers, and credibility and a surge in controversy since the Tesla boss bought the joint for $44 billion in October 2022. A swath of impulsive firings, service changes digital u-turns by Musk over the last year, plus a rise in hate speech and some pretty ill-considered retweets and antisemitic amplification by the SpaceX leader has seen big advertisers like Disney, Apple, Warner Bros Discovery and more walk way or at least pause their buys and campaigns.
With Mouse House CEO Bob Iger sitting nearby, Musk went on an onstage rant on November 29 at against the departing companies. “Don’t advertise,” he told the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin at teh Gray Lady’s DealBook Summit about his true thoughts on marketer with misgivings. “Somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising?! Blackmail me with money? Go f–k yourself. Go. F–k. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”
Partially that context and defiance was defined by Musk on when the billionaire finally filed his self-described “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters. Musk was suing the progressive watchdog group for a report it released earlier this year on the advertising of major brands appearing next to pro-Nazi content on the platform.
As CEO Linda Yaccarino continues to insist over the past few months that everything is fine at X/Twitter and the EU now is looking into the platform for running afoul of its Digital Services Act, the last thing that X itself posted that could bare any relation to what happened tonight was this yesterday:
Did someone flip the wrong switch?
