SPOKE TOO SOON

Musk’s Brag Comes Back to Haunt Him as X Hit by Massive Outage

Post first, think later.

Elon Musk fell into a trap of his own making after making a brag about a major internet outage. The world’s richest man used his social media platform X to show that it was still working despite a major, far-reaching internet blackout. “X still works,” he said amid the chaos caused by outages reported in Europe and in the U.S. on major platforms such as Amazon Web Services (including Prime Video and Alexa), Roblox, several banks, Reddit, and Snapchat. But Musk’s platform soon joined the others, with data from Down Detector noting that at around 9.45 a.m., there were 584 problems reported on X. Just 15 minutes later, that number had risen to 35,659, Forbes reports. About half of the reported problems were for people using the mobile app. Some reported that the program wouldn’t load, while others said that key features were offline for them, the New York Post reported. According to Variety, at the peak of the outage, Down Detector flagged more than 4 million reports across 500 companies.