Thousands report problems as X goes down with newsfeeds not loading
People are just getting an error message when trying to scroll their newsfeed on X.
Around 2,000 users reported problems on DownDetector this afternoon, saying they were struggling to access both the app and the website.
When we tried to access the site, we saw only this: ‘Something went wrong. Try reloading.’
This was followed by a button saying ‘retry’.
Problems began shortly before 3pm and were still continuing intermittently an hour later, with the blue ‘wheel of death’ just spinning around and only sometimes loading posts.
Commenting on the problems, one disgruntled user wrote: ‘It’s gone again. Musk is such a genius businessperson! He can’t help but crash TwiX and blow up rockets.’
The user was referring to the latest launches of SpaceX’s powerful Starship rocket, which have been hit with problems.
Debris rained down over the Caribbean after the test flights, which did not go to plan with an explosion in January and then again this month.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and chief executive of X, is trying to work out how to fly humans to Mars, though he must have a lot else on his plate with a reported 14 children, his role in politics, as well as stocks at Tesla tumbling.
Earlier this week, he announced the sale of X to xAI, the makers of chatbot Grok.
He said that the move will ‘unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach’.
You might have noticed responses on Grok relying a lot on tweets – when. they load at least – and this is only set to increase.
The companies have been linked since Musk launched xAI a year after buying Twitter, so it’s not clear what if anything of the basic experience will change for users. Paying X already users have access to Grok, and the model is trained on the huge amount of posts exchanged.
Yesterday, he quoted a post from Grok saying it was ‘working overtime’ from high usage, with the caption: ‘Servers are running hot’ and a sweat emoji.
Musk said the deal values xAI at 80 billion dollars (£61.8 billion) and X at 33 billion dollars.
He bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars (£34 billion) in 2022, sacked many staff and massively loosened up its moderation policies on hate speech, misinformation and user verification.
He also jettisoned the name Twitter and renamed it X, though the verb ‘to tweet’ has been harder to shake.
Posting on the site about the move, he wrote: ‘xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.
‘The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge.’
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