Social media platform X back up after global outage

Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, was restored globally on Thursday after more than 77,000 US users faced issues at the peak of the outage.

Users in Canada, Britain, France and other countries reported issues with accessing X and X Pro, earlier known as TweetDeck.

More than 7,000 users in Canada and Britain experienced issues with the platform, according to Downdetector data.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including users.

The cause of the outage, which began just after 0500 GMT, is not yet known and emails to X's communications and support teams bounced back.

Users on X, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, experienced an inability to view posts, receiving a “Welcome to X!” message. X Pro users encountered a message that said “Waiting for posts”.

The social media platform faced upheaval and uncertainty after Musk's $44bn (R806.6bn) acquisition, leading to layoffs, including numerous engineers responsible for fixing and preventing service outages, sources have previously told Reuters.

Users took to rival Meta's app, Threads, to discuss the outage, citing difficulties in accessing posts, replies and profiles on X.