X, formerly Twitter, has been experiencing intermittent disruptions since yesterday at around 3pm ET. These disruptions have been causing users to be unable to access their feeds, send/receive messages, or a combination of both.
Users keep receiving an error message that says “Something went wrong. Try reloading” without any recognizable cause. However, reloading the feed doesn’t help, nor does restarting the app.
What’s going on with X?
According to owner Elon Musk, the platform is being hit by targeted cyberattacks. At least, that’s what he wrote on his X account last night when it briefly worked again. In general, the outages only seem to last for a short time, with posts and messages going out again in the meantime.
Whether this is really a targeted cyberattack hasn’t been conclusively clarified. Musk didn’t make any specific accusations, but surmised that a “coordinated group and/or a country is involved.” He also hinted that actors from Ukraine were involved or linked the attacks to the protests and attacks against Tesla.
Curiously, the twitter.com site also went offline yesterday for the first time since Musk’s takeover and its renaming to X. Until now, the domain was still accessible, but presumably this has nothing to do with the outages.
What can you do about it?
As the X app becomes available from time to time, you can periodically check your feed to see if it’s working. In my case, I was unable to access my messages for around two hours last night. It worked again this morning, but currently my feed isn’t updating again.
If nothing helps, you can try switching to alternative platforms like Bluesky. Millions of users and creators now post regularly there, recreating what Twitter used to be like before it was driven into the ground. (PCWorld is on Bluesky, too!)
It’s currently not possible to predict how long these problems will continue. To check whether the disruption at X is still going on, all you can really do is come back every so often and see for yourself.
Further reading: Beginner’s guide to Bluesky
