X (Twitter) Outage & The New “Dislike” Rule

Did you have a problem just scrolling through your feed? You weren‘t the only one. X (Twitter) was having a bad Wednesday, March 18, 2026 with a massive outage.

Here‘s a straightforward synopsis of all the madness and the huge changes Elon Musk has just announced.

The Big Outage: What Happened?

As of this time approximately 8:00 PM IST (10:30 AM ET) yesterday the site was effectively down for about an hour.

The Symptoms:No new posts appeared, then all pictures stopped loading and a lot of us simply received a captcha error that said “Something went wrong. Try reloading.”
Who was affected? Over 33,000 reports flooded in from the US, and thousands more from India and the UK.
The Status Now: Everything is back to normal. The team fixed the “server connection” issues, though they haven’t officially said what caused the crash.

The New “Dislike” Button (With a Catch)

Immediately after launch, Elon Musk and his product team announced some eagerly awaited news on a feature that has been long-requested: a Twitter Dislike Button. However, restrictions were set:

Verified Only: The only way to signal to other users that you dislike a suggestion, is to click on the dislike button. However, only Premium Subscribers (Blue Check-mark) can do this!
Anti-Bot Tool: Musk says this is to stop “bot attacks.” If everyone could dislike posts, bots could team up to “bury” a real person’s post. By making it a paid/verified feature, it’s harder for fake accounts to manipulate the system.
It’s Private: Unlike a “Like,” the number of dislikes won’t be public. It’s a “downvote” that tells the X algorithm, “I don’t want to see this,” or “This is spam.”
Feedback Options: When you hit dislike on a reply, the app may ask why. You can choose options like:
- Spam
- AI-generated content
- Incorrect/Misleading information

Why this matters

X has decided to hide the dislike button behind a paywall in order to create more value for the “Blue Checkmark,” and in order to reduce the unpleasantness of thecomment sections. However, standard users aren‘t happy to see a feature that would normally be free to everyone now is a premium product.