The flow of sports news faced major disruptions Monday as X/Twitter experienced outages on the first day of NFL free agency’s “legal tampering” period.
Down Detector, a website that tracks platform outages, has shown several spikes in users reporting that X was inaccessible Monday.
“Twitter picked a hell of a day to shit the bed.” ProFootballTalk founder Mike Florio told Front Office Sports in a text message. The legal tampering period—which lasts from March 10 to 12—is when teams can talk to agents and agree to terms for trading free agency players, without it being official yet.
NFL insiders, who are perpetually in a race to beat their competitors to scoops where every second matters, have been thrown for a loop.
“Is this thing on? Fun day for an outage,” NFL Media’s Ian Rapoport wrote on X during a reprieve when the platform was actually working before relaying a free agency nugget: “Anyway: Free agent TE Evan Engram, formerly of the #Jaguars, is visiting the #Broncos, source says.”
In a “Be careful what you wish for” type of moment, Albert Breer tweeted, “It would’ve been WAY funnier if that happened at noon.”
In fact, the platform went down again right before noon Eastern, when legal tampering officially began.
The Athletic’s senior NFL insider Dianna Russini migrated over to upstart X competitor Bluesky, writing, “Well guess we will break news here today.”
Rapoport and the ProFootballTalk site are also posting free agency tidbits on Bluesky. ESPN’s Adam Schefter used the Twitter outage as an opportunity to direct his followers to check for breaking news on the ESPN app, though it was unclear how many of his followers could see his posts. Schefter does not have an official Bluesky account and a bot that automatically reposted his tweets to Bluesky shut down last month. Laura Rutledge also directed ESPN2 viewers to the app for NFL news.
“Agents and teams are hitting us up like, ‘What are you guys doing?’ Because 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,” NFL Media’s Mike Garafolo said on NFL Network.
A spokesperson for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment as to what caused the outages or what the expected timetable would be for the platform to be back on track. But around midday Monday X owner Elon Musk attributed the outage to a “massive cyberattack against X” that the company is working to trace.
