Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2023 July 31

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July 31

Twitter down?

Is Twitter down for everyone or just me? DuncanHill (talk) 21:53, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Assuming you've been hiding under a stone for the last week, Twitter has been renamed X, so I guess it's down for good. MinorProphet (talk) 22:42, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Well not really. I mean yes, Twitter is rebranding to X. But as with many things Musk it's been fairly haphazard. x.com still redirects to twitter.com. Also when I visit it, while it has the X logo, it says "Join Twitter today." Still it's better than ending up at GoDaddy [1]. In any case, despite Musk's typical craziness, it's likely twitter.com and x.com will end up at the same place for quite a while barring misconfigurations which will probably be way more common than they should be under Musk. Nil Einne (talk) 23:01, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

I kept getting "something has gone wrong, please retry". Then I opened a new tab and went to twitter.com and it asked me to log in, which did work, but my display preferences had all reset to default. So anyway, seems to be working again for now. DuncanHill (talk) 23:03, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

First, turn your computer completely off and turn it back on and then try again. Then, if that doesn't work, try to use an incognito browser. If that doesn't work, it is likely a networking issue between your computer and the website. 12.116.29.106 (talk) 11:31, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

I wonder how much 'ol Elon had to pay for x.com? Those 1- and 2-letter domain names have all been super highly coveted and squatted, I imagine... —scs (talk) 23:06, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

He already owned it. I don't know if someone else owned it before PayPal, though. See also single-letter second-level domain. --142.112.221.64 (talk) 03:14, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Musk thanked PayPal in 2017 for allowing him to "buy back" X.com,^[2] thereby suggesting he owned it previously. The X sum of money involved in the sales was not divulged, so we can keep wondering. We know, though, that Musk is X-essive in everything.  --Lambiam 10:51, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

x.com indicates that Musk's company owned it along with other investors. 12.116.29.106 (talk) 17:57, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

The article does not tell us whether the X.com company was the original owner of the domain name or perhaps bought it from Musk.  --Lambiam 23:51, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Reportedly,^[3] x.com was originally bought in 1990 for a company completely unrelated to Musk, which sold the domain name to Musk in 1999.  --Lambiam 08:57, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Even by 1999, it seems likely the domain name was already quite expensive. An interesting issue is that xx.com which seems an obvious typo (let's ignore xxx.com) is the sort of domain I'd normally expect a company to want to secure if they could no matter that typing in domain names is probably a bit less common then it used to be. The $38 million minimum price tag doesn't sound too bad for someone worth way more than $38 billion even accepting it's a fair chunk of cash. And one would have assumed it would have been cheaper or at least easier to get at $38 million before x.com was being promoted as the primary domain name of a major company. Nil Einne (talk) 15:03, 6 August 2023 (UTC)