X is beginning to recover after a serious data centre issue left parts of the platform down for many users. The outage started on Thursday, May 22, at around 11:00 AM PT, and although the company resolved the main problem by 10:35 AM PT on Friday, some parts of the site are still not working correctly.
According to updates shared on X’s developer platform, the incident was a “site-wide outage.” While most services have come back online, some login features are still having problems, showing “degraded performance.” The company did not give a full explanation but mentioned the outage in a brief update on Thursday afternoon.
“X is aware some of our users are experiencing performance issues on the platform today. We are experiencing a data centre outage, and the team is actively working to remediate the issue,” said the official X Engineering account.
Fire reported at X data centre
Although the company has yet to confirm the cause of the outage, the timing matches that of a fire that broke out at one of X’s leased data centres in Oregon. Wired reported that emergency crews were called to the facility near Portland at 10:21 AM PT on Thursday, just before the outage began.
Firefighters were on site for several hours, and early reports suggest that the fire may have started because of battery issues. It’s still unclear how much damage was done or whether the fire led to the service interruption. X has not responded to questions about the fire or confirmed whether it caused the problems on the platform.
The incident also spiked reports on Downdetector, a site that tracks service outages. Throughout Thursday and Friday, users complained about issues with direct messages and other functions.
Past problems tied to data centre changes
This isn’t the first time X has had issues with its data centres. In 2022, after Elon Musk took over the company, he pushed to move X’s servers out of a data centre in California to a new facility in Oregon. His goal was to cut costs, but engineers at the company had warned that the move would take several months to do safely.
Despite the warnings, Musk insisted the move should be done in weeks. This rushed approach led to many technical problems that lasted for months and even drew the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. The event was detailed in a biography of Musk and showed how the quick change caused serious challenges for the platform.
Now, with another Oregon data centre facing issues, users are again dealing with service problems that affect their ability to use the site normally.
X has yet to release a complete statement explaining the cause of the outage or what steps are being taken to prevent similar problems in the future. For now, users may continue to see slower performance or login issues while the company works to restore the platform entirely.
