Sometime Thursday night, timelines stopped updating for a number of users on X, the social network owned by billionaire Elon Musk.
Many users report that their notifications stopped working yesterday, meaning they aren’t being alerted to new posts by the people they follow on X. This reporter is experiencing the issue, as well. My X timeline hasn’t updated in 15 hours, since around 6 p.m. Eastern on May 8.
It appears to be a server-side bug. Users affected say that their timelines aren’t updating in the X mobile apps or on the web. That’s what this reporter is seeing, as well. Switching devices and browsers appears to make no difference, nor does signing up for X’s subscription service, X Premium.
Downdetector, a website that provides real-time information about the status of various applications and services, shows a spike in reports of X outages over the last 24 hours. Meanwhile, on Reddit, several threads about the X notifications issue popped up overnight.
“No notifications since about 10 p.m. last night here in Germany!” wrote one user in a thread on X’s unofficial subreddit. Another user in the same thread wrote, “I thought that uninstalling and reinstalling the app would work (it didn’t).”
X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The last major outage X suffered was in March, when users worldwide were abruptly disconnected from the social network and subsequently had trouble accessing their feeds, sending messages, and engaging with content. Musk, without evidence, blamed the disruption on a cyberattack.
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Prior to that outage, X experienced large-scale connectivity issues in December 2022 and July 2023.
After Musk acquired X, formerly known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022, he promptly slashed the company’s workforce by about 80% from 7,500 employees to 1,300 workers. X had just 550 full-time engineers as of January 2023, according to CNBC. A new wave of layoffs hit the company in November 2024, primarily affecting X’s engineering department.
