X Suffers Second Outage In 24 Hours Amid Musk’s Plans To Make It A Paid Platform

Micro-blogging site X, formerly called Twitter, faced an outage on Tuesday (September 19). This is the second time in less than 24 hours that the platform suffered an outage. Several users complained of facing issues while accessing X. According to outage detection site Downdetector.com, X (Twitter) reported downtime around 7pm (IST) on Tuesday. The outage detection platform itself depends on reports from X, so it is likely that it faced problems itself.

This comes within a day of the platform suffering an outage in major cities such as New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. 

Several users are said to have faced problems while loading the site. However, some parts of the site continued to load, for some people. Loading tweets and their timelines was an issue for many users.

The X outage also comes at a time when tech billionaire and SpaceX and X owner Elon Musk is mulling to make its users pay for accessing the platform. As per Musk, recent usage statistics for X show a substantial user base of 550 million on a monthly basis, generating a notable 100 to 200 million posts daily, CNBC has reported. 

Musk has not revealed how many paid subscribers the platform currently has. During its last public earnings in Q1 2022, Twitter had mentioned 229 million mDAUs (monetisable daily active users).

Musk is going to charge a “small monthly payment” from all X users and the platform would not be a free place anymore, soon. In a live-streamed interaction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Musk floated the idea that the social network may no longer be a free site, in a bid to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.

However, it should be noted that the idea of charging everyone on X is not a new idea as last year, the tech billionaire had floated it for the first time. The company currently charges $8 per month from its X Premium subscribers, which gives them the ability to edit posts, see fewer ads, write longer posts and prioritise rankings in search and conversations.