X Faces Second Outage in 24 Hours Due to Data Center Issues — Elon Musk's Platform Disrupted Again

X Faces Second Outage in 24 Hours Due to Data Center Issues — Elon Musk's Platform Disrupted Again

Elon Musk’s microblogging platform X (formerly Twitter) experienced another major outage on Saturday, May 24. This comes just a day after the company admitted that a data center failure had caused global service disruptions on Friday.

According to Downdetector, a significant spike in outage reports was recorded around 6 PM (Indian Standard Time). Thousands of users worldwide reported problems accessing the homepage, app interface, and login services. Many claimed their timelines appeared completely blank.

While X has yet to issue an official statement about Saturday’s outage, the company did acknowledge on Friday that it was facing data center-related issues.

On May 23, X’s engineering team tweeted:

“X is aware that some users are experiencing performance issues today. We encountered a data center outage and our team is actively working to resolve it.”

Fire at Data Center

These back-to-back outages come amid reports that a major fire broke out at one of X’s data centers in Hillsboro, Oregon, on Thursday. According to a report published by Wired on Friday, the fire prompted an extensive emergency response.

Citing multiple sources, Wired reported that emergency personnel found a room full of batteries at the site, which are believed to have contributed to the fire. However, it remains unclear whether the blaze directly impacted server operations.

Are Cost-Cutting Measures Increasing Outage Risks?

Before Elon Musk acquired X, Twitter operated three primary data centers: Sacramento, Portland, and Atlanta. This redundancy allowed uninterrupted service if one center went down, as the others could take over the load.

However, during Christmas 2022, Musk shut down the Sacramento data center as part of cost-cutting measures. This move was later identified as a major cause of outages. Over the next six months, the company reportedly relocated 2,573 server racks from Sacramento to its remaining centers in Portland and Atlanta, according to internal documents.

X is now believed to be leasing space in a facility operated by Digital Realty, a global data center company in the Portland area. Digital Realty provides varying levels of operational support and allows multiple companies to share the same infrastructure.

These recent developments raise questions about the platform's infrastructure resilience and the long-term impact of downsizing decisions made under Musk's leadership.