 "A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and the X logo are seen in this illustration taken January 23, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration")
Elon Musk-owned microblogging website X suffered another outage on Saturday (May 24), just a day after the company acknowledged “a data centre outage” on Friday and blamed it for service disruption across the world.
Downdetector showed a spike in outages around 6 pm IST.
Thousands of users across the globe reported facing problems accessing various parts of the site, including the homepage, app interface, and login services.
Some users also reported seeing blank timelines.
X has not released any statement regarding the fresh outage, but said Friday that it encountered some data centre-related issues, shortly after users reported disruption.
“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 on May 23.
Fire incident at X’s data centre
Back to back outages at X come as news outlet Wired reported Friday that a major fire broke out at X’s data centre in Hillsboro, Oregon on Thursday.
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.