When the sports world needed X the most, it vanished.
On Monday at noon EST, NFL teams were permitted to begin negotiating deals for unrestricted free agents. What also happened right around that time was X crashing for users all across the country.
The first crash came around 6 a.m. ET when over 20,000 users reported outages according to Downdetector. The issue was resolved before spiking again around 10 a.m. and then again just before noon — what was supposed to be prime time for the countless NFL free agency agreements being unofficially announced to the public.
If you feel like you’ve missed all the breaking deals of the NFL’s top free agents today, you’re certainly not alone.
Many fans flocked to Threads, Instagram’s X alternative, to try and keep up with the news while also expressing their frustration with X crashing on one of the most important days in the NFL’s offseason.
“Twitter being down during NFL Free Agency is a cruel joke,” one user said. “Sup, threads?”
“They need to suspend NFL free agency until Twitter is back up,” another user said. “This is like Christmas with no snow.”
Even those directly involved in the free agency were lost without X.
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“Agents and teams are hitting us up like, ‘What are you guys doing?’” NFL Network’s Mike Garafolo said. “They follow this stuff just as much as we do. So when X goes down, they’re operating without a net here. They have no idea where to find all this stuff.”
While fans were distraught without their NFL news on X, ESPN’s Adam Schefter, who plays a role in a majority of the league’s newsbreaking, ᴀssured fans during “SportsCenter” that the ESPN app was providing live alerts, at least.
Laura Rutledge echoed the same sentiments, saying, “You don’t need to see it on X. It’s on the ESPN app, as well as right here [on SportsCenter].”
As the moves came fast and furious — QB Sam Darnold joined up with the Seahawks, the Jets landed Justin Fields, Morgan Moses and Milton Williams headed to New England and D.J. Reed agreed to a deal with the Lions — fans attempting to follow along hit another roadblock when X, yet again, seemingly crashed around 2 p.m.
While X was back up momentarily in the afternoon, owner Elon Musk said that the platform is facing “mᴀssive” cyberattacks.
