By Jess Jones
Elon Musk’s X, previously known as Twitter, caused a brief disruption in the loading of links leading to some news outlets and social media rivals.
Users attempting to access content from an affected source through X experienced a delay of five seconds, according to tests run by The Washington Post and, later, Reuters.
Links to social media sites like Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram also delayed when clicked.
By late Tuesday afternoon, X appeared to have resolved the issue. In response to questions, it acknowledged the removal of the delay but declined to explain the incident further.
On Wednesday morning at 07.20, X was down, showing a message which read “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot. Try again.” It is unclear when the site stopped loading.
City A.M. approached X for comment regarding both the above incidents.
Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who bought Twitter in October and rebranded it to X in July, has previously taken a swing at news organisations and journalists critical of him and his ventures such as SpaceX and Tesla.
For a while, Twitter put measures in place to block users from sharing links to competing social media platforms.
The exact start time of X’s link delay remains unclear.
One attentive user on Hacker News, a tech forum, reported that X first started delaying links to The New York Times on 4 August 2023.
Notably, on the same day, Musk criticised the American publication’s coverage of South Africa, accusing it of endorsing genocide.
However, this is circumstantial evidence and no definitive link between these events has been established.
