If X Isn't Working, It's Not Just You

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If you're trying to access X on Friday afternoon (Eastern Time), you might be hitting a roadblock. That's what happened to me: I went to refresh my feed one last time before stepping away for the weekend, but noticed that nothing was loading. In fact, the site acted as if I had a brand-new account, and invited me to explore users to follow. But whenever I clicked anything, I'd just get errors.

I thought it might have just been on my end, because when I checked Downdetector, the site said: "User reports show no current problems with X (Twitter)." Indeed, the chart was flat, minus a small spike earlier today. But the comments were full of users talking about the site not working, confirming that I wasn't alone here. (Disclosure: ZiffDavis owns both Lifehacker and Downdetector.)

X has experienced plenty of similar instances of downtime, so, in all likelihood, the site will be back up soon. (It might even be up by the time you read this.) But it comes at the same time that X competitor Bluesky experienced interruptions to service due to a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). It could be a coincidence, but in Bluesky's case, the issue didn't stem from a bug—instead, it was an attacker flooding Bluesky's servers with too much traffic to function.