XPERIENCING DIFFICULTIES

Musk’s X Implodes After Trump Praised It as ‘Free Speech Platform’

As Elon Musk and Donald Trump held a bonkers Oval Office presser, Musk’s social media platform was having problems of its own.

X, the social media platform bought by Elon Musk, experienced major disruptions today, shortly after President Donald Trump praised is as a “free speech platform.”

“That was the worst outage I’ve seen,” one user wrote on X. “App basically just became posts from exactly 24 hours ago”. Other users reported seeing the homepage welcome screen as if they weren’t logged in, while feeds and the ability to post messages disappeared for thousands of users.

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Starting at roughly 3:45 p.m. ET, reports of outages across X began flooding into the online status-checking website Downdetector. Tens of thousands of users turned to the site, just one of many similar platforms logging website crashes, with reports peaking at 4:15 p.m. as 25,000 complaints came in from across the globe.

The X Developer Platform status page reported a “site-wide outage” noting that “Some X API endpoints may be affected.”

As of 6:15 p.m. reports to Downdetector site had dropped off significantly, although hundreds of outage complaints were still coming in. X Developers had updated their status by this time to note that “all systems are operational.”

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The brief outage comes on the heels of Musk’s (sort of) departure from the White House, at least in an official capacity, following the fulfillment of his contract as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). During an almost hour-long joint press conference in the Oval Office, Trump lavished praise on Musk, describing his “service to America” as “without comparison in modern history.”

“He’s already running one of the most innovative car companies in the world… and the most successful space company in, I guess, in history, you would have to say, the largest free speech platform on the internet, etcetera,” Trump said.

Outages at X are not uncommon. In fact, this is the third outage in a little over a week. On Monday, the platform suffered a major disruption following a fire in a U.S. data center owned by X. The week prior, another major outage was attributed by Musk, without evidence, to a “massive cyber attack.”

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Since Musk took over the platform in 2022, outages and disruptions have been on the rise. In 2023, The Guardian found such issues had been increasing since the buyout as Musk’s new tech employees tinkered with the X API, a service allowing other programs to interact with the site.

As the world’s richest man departs the White House, one might expect he would have more time to ensure that the products and services provided by the many companies he owns and runs are functional. However, as Trump warned during the press conference, “Elon’s really not leaving.”

A full explanation has not been given by X for the disruption. The Daily Beast has reached out to X for comment.

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Jack RevellNight Reporter

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