The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, which was then converted into X and is now worth $44 billion, is another setback as the social media platform has undergone a worldwide crash, which led to users’ difficulty in reaching the service. The downtime, which lasted for a few hours, caused discontent among millions of disenchanted users and also brought to the fore the issue of the sustainability of the social media platform under Musk’s management.
Global User Backlash Due to the Outage
As per the media, X (formerly Twitter) was offline for a long time, with people in the U.S., Europe, and Asia getting error messages when they tried to open the app or the internet browser. Users expressed their anger on other social media platforms such as Threads, Bluesky, and even Facebook, and the #TwitterDown hashtag was trending on several websites.
It is not the first time X has confronted technical difficulties after Musk’s arrival. The platform has had several outages, bugs, and glitches, which were mostly caused by the radical elimination of human resources and reorganization. Musk’s move to cut almost 80% of Twitter’s employees has been mostly met with derision from the public. The experts even criticized that the reduced engineering teams would result in service disruptions occurring more often.
Musk’s Highly Risky Venture
Musk’s whopping $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in October 2022 was the talk of the tech world and became one of the most disputable business buys in history. Following that, the billionaire has been very quick to turn it into a new era by presenting the following:
- Renaming Twitter “X”
- Introducing paid verification (Twitter Blue, now X Premium)
- Mass reduction of the employees
- Reaffirming the previously banned accounts
Nevertheless, these actions by the advertisers have not been sufficient to keep them on the platform. Consequently, both the sale of goods and services and user growth have come to a halt. The most recent breakdown is just one more item on the list of Musk’s problems, which critics are already challenging in terms of its sustainability.
What will X bring in the future?
Even though Musk sees only the positives of the complete transformation of X into an “everything app”—basically, it is shaped after China’s WeChat—technological hiccups, and the waning of the trust of the users and the advertisers alike could derail such progress. To make things worse, competitors such as Meta’s Threads, as well as decentralized platforms such as Bluesk, are adding to the mix as they are seen to be gaining momentum, thus posing a threat to X’s dominance in the social media space.
