Sports fans and reporters rely on the social media app X – formerly known as Twitter before Elon Musk purchased it and rebranded it. Unfortunately, the app had some major problems on one of the biggest news days of the year for NFL fans.
Monday marks the beginning of the "legal tampering" period in the NFL, where players are permitted to begin speaking to teams to negotiate and agree upon new contracts, effectively marking the beginning of the free agency period in the league.
Obviously, this leads to a lot of breaking news as players and teams agree upon deals, leading fans in search of real-time information from various insiders and reporters on social media. However, X made that difficult for many people on Monday morning.
As Ben Axelrod of Awful Announcing out, Musk's social media app "initially suffered an outage overnight, with thousands of users reporting outages early Monday morning. While services were restored for a few hours, the site and app went back down just before 10 a.m. ET, with more than 40,000 users reporting outages according to DownDetector.com."
This led to quite a problem for sports reporters, leading some of them to even choose to break news on competing social media app Bluesky, instead.
"Well guess we will break news here today," NFL insider Dianna Russini wrote in a post on Bluesky.
"Fun day for an X outage. Anyway: Free agent TE Evan Engram, formerly of the Jaguars, is visiting the Broncos, source says," NFL insider Ian Rapoport wrote in a post on Bluesky.
The X outage was even enough to convince NFL reporter Nicki Jhabvala of the Washington Post to sign up for Bluesky.
"Ok I finally did it. I'm here," he said in his first post.
It's worth noting that X did return a few minutes after its initial outage. However, two separate outages in the span of just a few hours ahead of one of the biggest days during the NFL offseason is certainly not great for sports fans and reporters.
2025 The Arena Group Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
This story was originally published March 10, 2025 at 11:01 AM.