X Goes Down As Fire Breaks Out At Musk’s Oregon Data Center
Having trouble checking your feed on the social media platform X this morning? You are not alone. X, formerly known as Twitter, is suffering a major outage that arose from an incident on Thursday and is affecting access to the site today, May 24, 2025. We tried to access the site this morning and were not able to. The root cause is a reportedly a fire that erupted at a data center in Hillsboro, Oregon.
Multiple sources requesting anonymity told Wired that the fire broke out on Thursday morning at the data center location, known as PDX11, which X owner Elon Musk leases from Digital Realty, one of the largest developers of data centers. It's said that firefighters arrived on the scene around at 10:21 a.m. (presumably PST, so 1:21 p.m. EST) and determined that batteries were involved. It's not clear if they're of the lithium-ion variety (the same type that caused Southwest Airlines to revise its portable charger policy) or Valve-Regulated Lead Acid (VLRA).
Fortunately, the fire was contained to the PDX11 facility and did not spread to other parts of the building. A spokesperson for Hillsboro Fire and Rescue told the site that the data center room was heavy with smoke, and that by 3:00 p.m., fire fighters were still at the scene. It's not clear precisely when the fire was put out.
"All personnel were safely evacuated, with no reported injuries. We continue to monitor the situation, prioritizing the safety of our personnel, the integrity of the facility, and minimizing customer impact," Ryan Young, vice president of Americas operations for Digital Realty, told Wired.
Oddly enough, we had been able to access X just fine throughout Thursday and Friday, but not this morning. This led us to check with Downdetector to see if this was a widespread issue, and sure enough the site indicates a major spike in user reports starting at around 8:17 a.m. EST this morning. By 9:02 a.m. EST, nearly 26,000 users had reported issues access X.
According to Tom's Guide, X's official engineering account previously acknowledged the outage (on Thursday), stating on X, "We is aware some of our users are experiencing performance issues on the platform today. We are experiencing a data center outage and the team is active working to remediate the issue."
