Elon Musk’s X back online after global outage

The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has been restored after a global outage on Thursday.

The problem reportedly began after 5am UK time and its cause is not yet known.

Thousands of users reported that they were unable to access the site properly. The website Downdetector, which tracks online outages, had logged almost 4,000 reports about the site and app by 6am in the UK.

Users on X were unable to view posts, instead receiving a “Welcome to X!” message. Users of X Pro, formerly Tweetdeck, had a message that said “Waiting for posts”.

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

Under the hashtag #TwitterDown, users with access shared memes about the outage, many imagining the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg celebrating.

The outage lasted about 45 minutes before timelines began to show as normal.

Since the takeover by Musk, attempts to contact X’s press team are met with automatic replies. Initially, these were in the form of a poo emoji but on Thursday the auto response read: “Busy now, please check back later”.

The site has had multiple glitches since the billionaire businessman took over the platform in October 2022. The workforce was cut from 7,500 to about 2,000 within six months of Musk’s takeover.

Engineers responsible for fixing and preventing service outages were among the thousands of employees who lost their jobs.