2 min read
The social media platform X (formerly Twitter), owned by Elon Musk, experienced a global outage on Saturday, temporarily blocking millions of users from accessing their feeds.
The disruption, however, was swiftly resolved, and services have now returned to normal across the globe.
The latest technical disruption came just two days after another significant outage on Thursday, marking the second global service failure for X within a single week. Both outages left users in multiple countries, including Pakistan, unable to log in, tweet, or refresh their feeds.
According to outage monitoring site DownDetector, more than 2,200 reports were logged at the height of Saturday’s interruption. The platform faced issues across both desktop and mobile versions, leaving users with limited to no functionality for several hours.
Confirmation from Authorities
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) addressed user concerns on social media, stating:
“Social media platform ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) is currently experiencing a mass outage affecting several countries, including Pakistan.”
They clarified that the disruption was not linked to any domestic internet blackout or blockage in Pakistan. This position was echoed by NetBlocks, a global internet observatory, which confirmed the outage was “widespread” and not caused by any alterations to internet infrastructure in Pakistan.
X Team Responds Swiftly
Despite no formal statement from the company explaining the root cause, the platform’s engineering team had earlier shared via a tweet that the “team is working 24/7 to resolve this.”
Following their announcement, users gradually regained access to their accounts, messaging functions, and feeds.
The Saturday outage was marked by users encountering several platform-wide issues. These included login difficulties, delayed direct messages, and broken links, which added to the confusion. Though functionality has since been restored, the lack of detailed communication from X has left users speculating about the cause.
Separately, X is currently dealing with political pressure in India. The government has issued executive orders directing the platform to block over 8,000 accounts. The company confirmed compliance but voiced its objections, stating:
“X has received executive orders from the Indian government requiring X to block over 8,000 accounts in India, subject to potential penalties including significant fines and imprisonment of the company’s local employees.”
X further noted that in many cases,
“The Indian government has not specified which posts from an account have violated India’s local laws,”and added, “for a significant number of accounts, we did not receive any evidence or justification to block the accounts.”
