Following A 45-Minute Outage, Musk’s X Website And App Are Back

Elon Musk’s X website and app are back online following a 45-minute outage that left thousands unable to access content.

The message continued that it was empty now, but it wouldn’t be long. Start following people and you’ll see the posts show up here.

However, the platform, previously known as Twitter, did seem to allow users to continue posting, despite them not showing up. #TwitterDown began trending shorting after 6 am as nearly 4,000 reports were filed on the website checker DownDetector.

The outage lasted about 45 minutes before user timelines started to display as expected.

Tesla billionaire Elon Musk took over the platform in a £33.6 billion ($44 billion) deal last autumn.

It comes after the EU said it would launch an inquiry into X over a suspected breach of obligations in its first such investigation under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

The DSA, which entered into force in November last year, needs extremely extensive online platforms and search engines to do more to tackle illegal content and risks to public security, and to protect their services against manipulative techniques.

The Commission said that the proceedings will focus on countering the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, and the effectiveness of measures taken to combat information manipulation, notably of the ‘community notes’ system.

It will also concentrate on the measures taken by X to improve the translucency of its platform and a suspected misleading design of the user interface such as checkmarks linked to subscription products, the so-called Blue checks.

The Commission said it will now carry out an in-depth investigation as a matter of priority and continue to gather evidence by sending additional requests for information, conducting interviews and inspections.

X, which is owned by Elon Musk, is part of a group of large tech firms facing increased scrutiny under the DSA.

Following Hamas’ attacks on Israel on October 7, EU industry chief Thierry Breton sent letters to X, Meta, TikTok and Alphabet reminding them of their responsibilities under the DSA to tackle harmful and illegal content.

The platforms answered promptly to Breton, highlighting steps they’ve taken to prevent disinformation on their platform but Elon Musk questioned Mr Breton over the disinformation charge.

Only X received a formal request for information under the DSA and has responded to the request.

The Commission said a preliminary investigation conducted so far included an analysis of a report submitted by X in September, X’s transparency report published in November, and the platform’s replies to a formal request for information about illegal content in connection to Hamas’ attacks against Israel.

If X wasn’t online anymore, how on earth would people manage to get through the day? However, even if X wasn’t there online anymore, some other platform would appear to do the same thing as X does.

Come to think of it, how would we manage if the media didn’t exist any longer? How about carrier pigeons? They were quite newsworthy. Saying that they were extremely nice to eat as well!

These types of platforms are of course excellent if you want to have a say in what goes on. The problem is now, they deny people the right to have a say and then say they’re troublemakers or terrorists.

I’ve heard it said that we don’t need social media to speak freely. The thing is, we’re not allowed to speak freely anymore, whether it be on social media or elsewhere. We don’t have any say at all! I don’t know any platform now that the truth is still allowed.

Hacking and outages are very common now, so we’d better get used to it.

What on earth was wrong with the name ‘Twitter’? Why did Elon Musk have to change it when everyone was used to it? Perhaps we should be calling Elon Musk the ‘Almighty’ or just ‘Musk’. Elon would look rather good pickled in a bottle of perfume, we could call it ‘Eau de Elon’. Please don’t do it Elon, you’re not worth the skunk scent it would produce!