Twitter Down Sparks Avalanche of Jokes, Memes: ‘Welcome to X’

Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, was down for about an hour on December 21, a temporary outage which sparked widespread mockery by users.

For a little less than an hour, the platform did not allow users to refresh content, only showing a message on the platform that reads: “Welcome to X! This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now.”

It was the latest technical issue faced by the social media platform after external links were temporarily not working last week and the website went down for about 40 minutes on December 17. The Thursday outage, which led to a rise in the use of the hashtag #twitterdown, appeared to be a global blackout for X.

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc and X (formerly Twitter) Ceo speaks at the Atreju political convention organized by militants of Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), on December 15, 2023 in Rome, Italy. Social media user mocked Musk’s platform X after the website was down for about an hour on December 21. Antonio Masiello/Getty Images

“Did twitter break? Welcome to X?,” one user wrote, hinting at the many issues and controversies that have surrounded the social media platform since one of the most famous billionaires in the world took over. Musk completed the purchase of Twitter on October 27, 2022 for a total of $44 million.

Among the many changes he implemented was to make Twitter’s once-coveted blue check, which was assigned to recognized public figures, experts, politicians and journalists, part of the platform’s paid subscription, for a total of $8 a month. One X user mocked the payment after the system went down on Thursday, writing: “Twitter’s down again! Totally worth the $8.”

This is a breaking news story and will be later updated.

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