In a noteworthy development, over 90,000 users of X, a widely used social media platform, faced a service disruption in the early hours of last Thursday. This incident marks the most substantial outage since Elon Musk acquired the platform in October 2022. Concurrently, there was a noticeable shift of users to Threads, a rival app by Mark Zuckerberg, as evidenced by Google Trends data.
Surge in threads usage amid X's downtime
Issues with X's service were primarily reported on Downdetector, especially between 12 AM and 3 AM EST last Thursday. The disruption affected users globally, particularly those accessing X's app, constituting about 70% of the reported problems. Simultaneously, interest in Threads, often perceived as a less dynamic yet stable alternative to X, significantly increased. Google Trends data revealed a peak in searches for “Threads” around 1 AM on December 21, coinciding with the period of X's service issues.
Aftereffects of X's service interruption
In the aftermath of the outage, despite recent initiatives to add new features such as job postings and its AI chatbot Grok, X continues to lose ground to Threads. In just three months of operation, Threads was nearing 100 million monthly users and has since expanded its user base by an additional 450 million in Europe. In contrast, X has been operating with a considerably reduced staff, now at about 2,000 employees, down from over 7,000 before Musk's takeover, as per TechCrunch.
The cause of the outage remains uncertain. Earlier last week, X had updated to version 10.21 on December 18, aiming at enhancements and bug fixes. However, it's unclear if the update was related to the outage. The issue gained more attention as it trended on X under the hashtag #TwitterDown, underlining the challenges with Elon Musk's rebranding of the platform.
Official response and conjecture
As yet, X has not made an official statement about the outage. However, X executive Chris Bakke humorously suggested a possible population increase in nine months due to the outage. Interestingly, the service disruption coincided with the birthday of X's CEO, Linda Yaccarino.
