UPDATED, 3:55 p.m. ET: X, Elon Musk’s new name for the social network formerly known as Twitter, appears to be adding an approximately five-second delay to links that are redirected to certain sites, including Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
Earlier Tuesday, X’s delay also was applied to links to the New York Times and Reuters. However, after news about the slowdowns was published in outlets including the Washington Post, X appears to now be linking out to the Times and Reuters without any delay.
Meanwhile, links posted on X to Bluesky, a decentralized social network backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and Substack still seemed to be subject to the delay. As noted the Washington Post, Meta and the other companies “have previously been singled out by Musk for ridicule or attack.”
X’s apparent throttling of links to certain domains was first flagged by a user on Y Combinator’s Hacker News discussion forum, who claimed to have first noticed the delay in New York Times links on Aug. 4. X uses its own link-shortening service, t.co. A message on that site says, “Twitter uses the t.co domain as part of a service to protect users from harmful activity, to provide value for the developer ecosystem, and as a quality signal for surfacing relevant, interesting Tweets.”
An inquiry to X’s press email address produced an autoreply that said, “We’ll get back to you soon.” Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino have not addressed the issue.
Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has said that he will continue to oversee X’s product and technology teams, while Yaccarino is in charge of advertising and business operations.
Musk acquired Twitter in a debt-laden $44 billion deal last October. In December, he banned the Twitter accounts of several journalists after claiming they had “doxxed” him by posting links to an account that tracked his private jet, before reinstating several of them the following day.