X was down — here's what happened in the brief global outage

X had a major blip, but it's fixed now

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Xdown on mobile
(Image credit: © Future/Mark Wilson)

X was down for thousands of users on March 18 for around an hour, but Elon Musk's social network quickly recovered and is back to full health.

According to Downdetector, the issues started at around at 10.47am ET / 2.47pm GMT, when a large spike in reports appeared in both the US and UK. The reports peaked at around 26,000 in the US and just under 5,000 in the UK, but quickly plummeted to a baseline level at about 11.44am ET / 3.44pm GMT.

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This looks like another big one

A Downdetector graph showing X issues

(Image credit: Downdetector)

We haven't seen a spike in reports about X issues this big for, well, a month since the last outage on February 16.

Right now, there are over 36,000 reports on Downdetector in the US and over 8,000 in the UK. In short, that's big and more serious than the early stages of the February outage.

However, X is already working again for me after a brief period of error messages, so perhaps this one will be more short-lived.

X is recovering

A Downdetector graph showing reported X issues

(Image credit: Downdetector)

Good news for fans of memes and doomscrolling — X seems to already be recovering from its earlier issues.

The site is now working for me and the reports have dropped sharply on Downdetector, falling to just over 14,000 in the US and around 3,700 in the UK.

I'll be keeping an eye on this one to see if there are any aftershocks, but fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately for work productivity) Elon Musk's social network seems to be back up and running.

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