 "Image shows Elon Musk's X home page. File image/AP")
US billionaire Elon Musk-owned X suffered a major global outage early Friday (May 23), with users facing problems with the microblogging website. Downdetector.com showed nearly 6,000 users reported outages globally.
In a post, X has acknowledged the error and said its team is working to fix this as soon as possible.
“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,” wrote X’s engineering account.
The company has not provided any update after that.
Users in India were also affected by the disruption. More than 250 people from India reported outages on Downdetector.com.
Fire reported at X’s data centre
Meanwhile, news outlet Wired reported a major fire incident Thursday morning (May 22) at a data centre in Hillsboro, Oregon, leased by X.
The outlet quoted multiple sources as saying that the fire led to an extended response from emergency crew.
The crew reportedly found a room with batteries that were deemed to be involved in the fire
However, it was not clear whether server operations were hampered by the incident or not.
Cost-cutting leading to frequent outages?
Before Elon Musk bought X (formerly Twitter), the company had three data centres located in Sacramento, Portland, and Atlanta. This setup meant that if one data centre failed, traffic could be directed to the other two, preventing any single data centre from being overwhelmed.
Around Christmas Eve 2022, Musk decided to shut down the Sacramento data centre to save money. This led to a significant outage for the company. Over the following six months, the company relocated over 2,573 server racks from Sacramento to the data centres in Portland and Atlanta, according to internal documents.
In the Portland area, X appears to lease space in a building associated with Digital Realty, one of the largest data centre developers globally.
Digital Realty offers different levels of operational support at its sites, which can host one or more tenants. It is unclear if X shares this facility with other companies.