Key Points
- X experienced a widespread outage beginning May 22, which was resolved by the next morning.
- The outage coincides with a fire at an X data center in Oregon. Batteries may have contributed to the fire, but details remain unclear.
- X has not confirmed a link between the fire and the service disruption.
- Past rapid server relocations under Elon Musk have caused technical issues and scrutiny.
Social media platform X (formerly Twitter) is gradually recovering from a major outage that disrupted services for many users starting Thursday, May 22. According to X’s developer platform, the disruption began around 11:00 AM PT and was officially marked as resolved by 10:35 AM PT on Friday. However, some features, particularly login services, are still experiencing degraded performance.
The company has remained mostly silent regarding the ongoing issues, issuing only a brief statement Thursday afternoon citing a data center outage as the cause of the widespread performance problems. During the incident, users reported trouble accessing direct messages and other site features, with outage tracking site Downdetector showing a significant spike in user reports.
The timing of the outage coincides with a fire reported at one of X’s data centers near Portland, Oregon. Wired reported that local firefighters responded to the blaze at 10:21 AM PT on Thursday and remained on the scene for several hours. Though the full extent of the damage is unclear, early indications suggest that batteries were involved in causing or fueling the fire.
X has not confirmed whether the fire caused the outage or disclosed details about the incident’s impact on operations. Nonetheless, this isn’t the first data center issue the company has faced. In 2022, shortly after Elon Musk acquired the platform, he ordered a rapid relocation of company servers from California to Oregon to reduce operational costs. Despite engineers’ warnings that such a move should take months, Musk demanded it be done in weeks. This aggressive migration caused extended technical instability and triggered an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.
The latest outage has renewed concerns over the reliability of X’s infrastructure, and the consequences of past rushed decisions regarding server management.
