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Over 90,000 users on X experienced an outage on Thursday morning, marking the platform’s most severe outage since Elon Musk’s takeover in October of 2022, according to Bloomberg. Data from Google Trends shows that many users rushed to Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads during the outage.
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X users reported platform outages on Downdetector between the hours of 12 AM and 3 AM EST on Thursday with sporadic reports throughout the night. Roughly 70% of the outages came from users on X’s app, impacting users around the world. During those same hours, Google searches for “Threads” peaked in the United States, reaching its highest interest level of the week. Threads continues to be like the boring cousin to X, but the app from Meta has consistently onboarded users by simply being a stable alternative.
Google Trends shows searches for “Threads” peaked at 1 AM on December 21st, the same time that X went down for over 90,000 users.Screenshot: Google Trends
X has added a slew of new features in recent months, including job postings and its AI chatbot Grok, which is persistently woke despite its father’s wishes (a recurring issue for Musk). Despite the “innovations,” the platform continues to bleed users to Threads, which was nearing 100 million monthly users in just three months of operation and has since expanded to 450 million more potential users in Europe. X is operating with a significantly reduced staff of roughly 2,000 people these days, according to TechCrunch, down from over 7,000 before Musk’s takeover.
The reason for the outage is currently unknown. X received an update, version 10.21, earlier this week on December 18th, claiming to have “made improvements and squashed bugs.” It’s unclear if these are related. News about the outage, under #TwitterDown, was trending on X, underscoring how Elon Musk’s new name for the platform has failed to catch on.
X has yet to comment on the outage, despite jokes from executive Chris Bakke who said there might be a population boom nine months from now. The X outage came on the birthday of its CEO, Linda Yaccarino, which is also today.