Twitter Down Sparks Avalanche of Jokes, Memes: 'Welcome to X'

Elon Musk's social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, was down for about an hour on December 21, a temporary outage that sparked widespread mockery by users.

For a little less than an hour, the platform did not allow users to refresh content, only showing a message on the platform that read: "Welcome to X! This is the best place to see what's happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now."

It was the latest technical issue faced by the social media platform after external links were temporarily not working last week and the website went down for about 40 minutes on December 17. The Thursday outage, which led to a rise in the use of the hashtag #twitterdown, appeared to be a global blackout for X, which was frozen for thousands of users.

According to Downdetector, a website offering information about the real-time status of websites and social media platforms, there were 74,823 "down" reports for X at the peak of the website's outage as of 12:30 a.m. ET on Thursday. The reports came from users from the U.S., as well as countries like the U.K., Australia, France and India.

"Did twitter break? Welcome to X?," one user wrote, hinting at the many issues and controversies that have surrounded the social media platform since one of the most famous billionaires in the world took over. Musk completed the purchase of Twitter on October 27, 2022, for a total of $44 million.

Among the many changes he implemented was to make Twitter's once-coveted blue check, which was assigned to recognized public figures, experts, politicians and journalists, part of the platform's paid subscription, for a total of $8 a month. One X user mocked the payment after the system went down on Thursday, writing: "Twitter's down again! Totally worth the $8."

Musk is known to have laid off 3,700 people after acquiring the social media platform, about half of Twitter's workforce. Among those fired there were several engineers responsible for fixing and preventing outages, according to sources quoted by Reuters.

One user shared a meme hinting at the close relationship between Musk and Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whom the billionaire visited in Rome last weekend during her party's traditional annual festival. The meme alleged that Thursday's outage had been caused by India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who also has close ties with Meloni (the two are known by the hashtag of "Melodi").

Others joked about Mark Zuckerberg, owner of rival social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Threads, celebrating every time X has been down recently. Many X users took to Meta's rival app, the recently launched Threads, to discuss the outage on Musk's platform.

X was restored early on Thursday. The cause of the outage is not yet known and emails to X's communications and support teams bounced back.