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Elon Musk's X went down for tens of thousands of users in the US, following a fire at one of the company’s leased data centers in Hillsboro, Oregon.
The Thursday morning fire required an “extended response from emergency crews,” though no serious injuries were reported, Wired reports. X has not officially commented on the reports, so it’s unknown if the events are connected. The fire, which produced heavy smoke, was reportedly confined to a single battery storage room.
According to data from Downdetector, X's performance issues began to mount at roughly 8:20 a.m. ET this morning, peaking around 40 minutes later before slowly declining. Roughly 26,000 people have reported issues with the platform so far.
App users were significantly more likely to be impacted than desktop users, at rates of 68% versus 24%. The most impacted areas appear to be New York and Dallas, followed by Los Angeles, Florida, and Atlanta.
One user on Reddit, who claimed earlier this week he has been unable to access the social network for 24 hours, quipped: “This is what happens when you fire too many people in the name of efficiency.” Another user said: "Elon too cheap to pay Operational Testing (OT)," a field of IT that covers things like performance monitoring.
X was also hit by an outage on March 10, which attributed to a cyberattack, potentially by a foreign country or a coordinated group, but the company hasn't produced evidence of that.
(Disclosure: Downdetector owner Ookla is owned by PCMag parent company Ziff Davis.)