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Twitter's new X.com domain is redirecting some users, including cofounder Jack Dorsey, to a GoDaddy ad

Jul 24, 2023, 18:01 IST
Business Insider
Elon Musk.Britta Pedersen/Getty Images
  • Elon Musk said Sunday that X.com had started redirecting users to Twitter.
  • But several users reported that it instead showed them an advert for web-hosting company GoDaddy.
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Elon Musk's rebranding of Twitter to X has already suffered its first glitch, as users report the x.com website doesn't work properly.

The world's richest person announced Sunday that the domain, which Musk previously used for PayPal, had started redirecting users to Twitter.

But several people have instead been shown an advert for the web-hosting company GoDaddy.

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Brian Merchant, a tech columnist for the Los Angeles Times, shared a screenshot of the malfunctioning link.

"x.com is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com," the site read, accompanied by a link to purchase the domain alongside sofa adverts.

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That same bug was reportedly encountered by Ryan Mac, a New York Times reporter, as well as Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey.

Christopher Stanley, a Twitter employee, replied to Dorsey with an apology and blamed "DNS."

That stands for domain name system. It appeared that its cache, a temporary storage, is re-serving old data to some users.

Dorsey doesn't seem to be the biggest fan of the new X logo and retweeted the Twitter bird design with a goat emoji, meaning the greatest of all time.

Some Twitter users said they encountered other glitches with the new domain, like the server IP being unsecure or not located, and even a file being downloaded.

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This is all made stranger because x.com didn't previously show a GoDaddy advert, but a simple letter X.

Dorsey's use of "Y" appears to refer to the error message the website used to display then, according to Musk.

X.com began as an online bank founded by Musk in 1999 before it merged with Peter Thiel's Confinity to become PayPal a year later.

Then the company was bought by eBay, which in 2014 was using the domain for "x.commerce, an eBay Inc. company," before Musk repurchased the domain in 2017.

Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment made outside of normal working hours.

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