An X outage has frustrated the netizens as they find empty timelines with no posts visible today, December 21, morning. This year, we have seen many such major outages occurring. Check the 5 major outages that have occurred in 2023. (AFP)

Twitter experiences outage, joining the list of 5 significant social media outages in 2023

Jim HendlerDecember 21, 23 Social Media, Twitter

Many users of X (formerly Twitter) were surprised and disappointed this morning when they discovered that their home feed was empty, indicating yet another outage on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform. This ongoing situation has affected thousands of users, but it is not the first time a social media platform has experienced such an issue. Throughout the year, there have been several incidents of outages on various platforms, and we will now examine the top 5 social media outages of 2023.

5 Big Social Media Outages in 2023

1. On February 9, 2023, YouTube, a video sharing platform owned by Google, suffered a partial outage that largely affected users in the United States. Hundreds of users reported that they encountered an error while loading the YouTube homepage. The problem was across all tools on the platform, with 44 percent of users reporting problems with the website, 43 percent reporting problems with the app, and 13 percent of users reporting problems using videos, such as DownDetector, an online outage tracking site.

2. On March 9, 2023, popular social media platform Instagram lost up to 30,000 users in a global outage. Many reported experiencing problems 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 areas.

3. On April 21, 2023, X suffered a major outage. Interestingly, it came a day after the platform made a significant decision to remove the blue tick verification from legacy users. The microblogging site became inaccessible to thousands of users, causing frustration. According to the report, the outage was regional and largely within the United States, although it may have affected some other regions as well. The most persistent problem for users was that the home page does not update. Others have mentioned issues like tweets not loading, DM not working and trending section not visible.

4. On June 12, 2023, popular discussion forum Reddit suffered a massive global outage. According to Downdetector, up to 45,000 users reported problems using the website and various subreddits. The outage came on the same day thousands of subreddits planned to protest the company’s new API pricing changes by going private. According to the report, the blackout of subreddits was partly the reason why the company suffered the outage.

5. On July 11, 2023, Meta Platforms’ social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram suffered major outages in the United States. More than 13,000 users of these applications reported various problems in using the applications and the web interface. According to Downdetector, more than 13,000 Instagram users were unable to access the platform, while 5,400 Facebook users and 1,870 WhatsApp users were also affected by the outages.