X briefly hit by ‘international outages’: monitors

AFP: Service was restored to Elon Musk-owned social network X on Monday afternoon after it had failed to show posts to users in many countries.

The site was displaying content, allowing users to post and otherwise functioning normally again around 1530 GMT, after the Downdetector tracking website reported a spike in outage reports around two hours before.

Downdector showed that reports of issues peaked in Pakistan at 6:54pm, with 275 users flagging problems, before slowly tapering down to 8 by 7:54pm.

X had appeared to be suffering “international outages,” connectivity monitor Netblocks posted on the open-source social network Mastodon during the disruption.

The breakdown was “not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering”, added Netblocks, which regularly flags technical issues with popular online services and sites as well as interference by national governments.

Its most recent posts about similar outages for X came on February 9, the day after the Super Bowl in the US, and February 1.

AFP journalists in countries including France and Thailand had also been unable to access X on Monday afternoon.

Spokespeople for X did not respond to AFP’s request for comment on the outage before service was restored.

Musk laid off thousands of people at the former Twitter and changed its name after buying the service in 2022.

He has since merged it with his xAI company, which develops the Grok chatbot.

xAI is set to in turn be absorbed by Musk’s rocket firm SpaceX, with that merged entity expected to go public as early as summer this year.

Last month, the social media platform faced issues twice, on Jan 13 and Jan 16, with the outages affecting thousands of users globally.