X outage: Twitter goes down but it isn't the first time; Know 5 major social media outages in 2023

X outage: Many X (formerly Twitter) users who opened the app and website to check posts and catch up to the daily trends today morning were met with a rude awakening when they found empty timelines on their home feed. The realization set in quickly that the Elon Musk-owned social media platform had suffered yet another outage. This was the experience of thousands of users, and the situation is still ongoing. However, it was not the first time a social media platform has suffered an outage, with similar incidents making headlines throughout the year. Let us take a look at the 5 major social media outages in 2023.

5 major social media outages of 2023

1. On February 9, 2023, YouTube, the Google-owned video-sharing platform, suffered a partial outage that largely affected users in the US. Hundreds of users reported facing an error while loading the homepage of YouTube. The issue was across all mediums of the platform with 44 percent of users reporting issues with the website, 43 percent reporting issues with the app, and 13 percent of users reporting issues accessing the videos, as per DownDetector, an online outage monitoring website.

2. On March 9, 2023, the popular social media platform Instagram went down as many as 30000 users in a global outage. Many reported suffering issues in logging into the platform, accessing the feed, opening DMs, and other areas. DownDetector highlighted that several countries were affected, with the UK, India, and Australia being the worst affected regions.

3. On April 21, 2023, X suffered a major outage. Interestingly, it came a day after the platform made a landmark decision to remove blue tick verification for legacy users. The microblogging website became inaccessible to thousands of users, creating frustrations. It was reported that the outage was a regional one and largely was contained within the US, although some other regions might have been affected as well. The most persistent issue for users was that the home page was not updating. Others have mentioned issues such as tweets not loading, DM not working and the trends section not being visible.

4. On June 12, 2023, the popular discussion forum Reddit suffered a massive global outage. As many as 45,000 users reported issues accessing the website and different subreddits, as per Downdetector. The outage occurred the same day when thousands of subreddits planned to protest the company's new API pricing changes by going private. According to a report, subreddits going dark was in part the reason behind the company suffering the outage.

5. On July 11, 2023, Meta Platforms' social media platforms, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, suffered major outages in the US. More than 13,000 users of these apps reported various issues with accessing the apps and the web interface. According to Downdetector, more than 13,000 Instagram users were unable to access the platform, whereas the outages also affected 5,400 Facebook users and 1,870 WhatsApp users as well.