'I scream!' Strange X outage kills outgoing links in yet another blow for billionaire Elon Musk

X (formerly Twitter) is going through a rough period. Earlier, the platform witnessed an exodus of advertisers after the owner Elon Musk was involved in an antisemitic controversy with another user. Later, at a conference, Musk said during an interview that advertisers leaving would result in the social media site shutting down and he even used abusive language. Now, a new issue suddenly appeared on the platform in the early hours of December 14. An X outage was spotted by many users who found that no outgoing links were working for over an hour, and clicking them gave an error message. The issue is reportedly now fixed, but there is no word from the company on what happened. This is concerning considering this is not the first time it has happened.

According to a report by The Verge, URL links redirecting users to different websites saw a strange error message that said “This page is down. I scream. You scream. We all scream... for us to fix this page. We’ll stop making jokes and get things up and running soon”. The issue occurred at nearly 1 AM in the night on Thursday (still Wednesday afternoon in the US).

Strange X outage blocks outgoing links

Usually, when you click on an external link that belongs to a different website (unlike reposts, which are internally directed), you first are sent to a redirection portal that captures the data of the URL and then sends you your way. However, during the outage, this did not happen. Instead, users were sent to the redirection portal which only showed the error message and did not process the link.

Interestingly, this is not the first time an X outage like this has occurred. The Verge reported a similar issue in March 2023 when clicking on links did not do anything and even images were not loading properly. During the brief outage, an error message popped up when clicking on a link that said, “your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.”

At the time, official communication from X stated it occurred due to an internal change that had some unintended consequences. However, a report suggested that it likely occurred due to a mistake by the only reliability engineer in the company, as Musk had fired the rest during his massive layoff spree.

These issues, accompanied by advertiser exodus do point towards a bumpy ride for the platform. It remains to be seen how Musk, CEO Linda Yaccarino, and the rest of the stakeholders navigate through these difficult times.