X Suffers Major Outage Following Oregon Data Center Fire

Elon Musk’s X went down for tens of thousands of users in the US today, following a fire at one of the company’s leased data centers in Hillsboro, Oregon, earlier this week.

Wired reported that the fire required an “extended response from emergency crews,” though no serious injuries were reported. X has not yet officially commented on the reports, so it’s unknown if the events are connected. The fire was allegedly confined to a single battery storage room, though heavy smoke was produced.

According to data from DownDetector, X’s issues began to mount at roughly 8:20 a.m. ET, peaking around 40 minutes later before slowly declining. Roughly 26,000 people have reported issues with the platform so far.

App users were significantly more likely to be impacted than desktop users, at rates of 68% versus 24%. The most impacted cities appear to be New York and Dallas, followed by Los Angeles, Florida, and Atlanta.

Users were quick to flock to social media to critique the company, which was hit by another outage earlier in the week, on Thursday. One user on Reddit, who claimed earlier this week he has been unable to access the social network for 24 hours, quipped: “This is what happens when you fire too many people in the name of efficiency.”

Another user said: “Elon too cheap to pay Operational Testing (OT).” This is a field of IT that covers things like performance monitoring.

This isn’t the first time X has been hit by a major outage this year; it was also hit by another severe outage on March 10. Musk attributed that outage to a cyberattack, potentially by a foreign country, but evidence has yet to be provided for the true cause of the attack.

DownDetector is owned by PCMag’s parent company, Ziff Davis.

About Will McCurdy

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I’m a reporter covering weekend news. Before joining PCMag in 2024, I picked up bylines in BBC News, The Guardian, The Times of London, The Daily Beast, Vice, Slate, Fast Company, The Evening Standard, The i, TechRadar, and Decrypt Media.

I’ve been a PC gamer since you had to install games from multiple CD-ROMs by hand. As a reporter, I’m passionate about the intersection of tech and human lives. I’ve covered everything from crypto scandals to the art world, as well as conspiracy theories, UK politics, and Russia and foreign affairs.

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