X (Twitter) outage hits UAE users: Musk vows to stay ‘super focused’, promises major fixes

Dubai: Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, is facing a major global outage that began on Thursday, May 22, and continued into Saturday, leaving tens of thousands of users unable to access the app or website for hours.

The disruption impacted users across various regions, including the UAE, with widespread complaints about login failures, inaccessible features, and issues sending or receiving direct messages.

Shortly after partial service resumed, Musk acknowledged the platform’s instability, saying, “As evidenced by the X uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made.”

He added that he's returned to an intense work schedule with critical projects ahead. “Spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference, server, or factory rooms. I must stay super focused on X, xAI, and Tesla — plus the Starship launch next week — as we roll out critical technologies,” he wrote.

Musk, who earlier pledged to devote more time to Tesla and scale back his political involvement, now faces growing pressure to stabilise X’s operations amid ongoing technical issues.

According to outage tracker Downdetector, users began experiencing issues with X (formerly Twitter) late Friday, continuing into Saturday.

The platform's engineering team confirmed the disruption was due to a data center failure. User complaints spiked sharply on Saturday, with the Downdetector outage graph peaking at 4:37 pm UAE time with 419 reports.

Globally, reports surged from 887 at 5:32 pm IST on May 23 to 25,756 by 5:02 pm IST on Saturday, underscoring the widespread impact.

In the UAE, Downdetector recorded 87 reports at 7:22 pm on May 23, which rose to 349 by 5:37 pm on Saturday, indicating a significant local impact.

As per Downdetector’s outage graph, in the UAE, 68% of complaints were about the mobile app, 24% involved login issues, and 8% concerned the desktop website.

By Friday evening, X (formerly Twitter) had partially restored some services, but many users continued to experience intermittent issues. On Saturday, the platform suffered another major outage, disrupting access for thousands of users worldwide.

The fresh wave of outages began around 5:45pm IST, with widespread reports of login failures, app glitches, and website accessibility problems.

Earlier, X’s official engineering team acknowledged the initial issue, attributing it to a data center outage.

“X is aware some of our users are experiencing performance issues on the platform today,” the @XEng account posted. “We are experiencing a data center outage and the team is actively working to remediate the issue.”

While engineers have resolved several early problems, the platform is yet to return to full functionality. The X team has assured users that efforts to restore complete service are ongoing.