Community Notes On X Appear To Be Down -- No Longer Publicly Displayed, Still There In Backend, Working On A Fix

Analysis

  • by: Maarten Schenk

STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Community Notes On X Appear To Be Down -- No Longer Publicly Displayed, Still There In Backend, Working On A Fix Three Days?

Several users are currently reporting Community Notes on X have disappeared from their timelines. This is not by itself unusual, sometimes notes that are voted "helpful" by Community Notes users later get downvoted into "not helpful" status. But right now it appears even notes that have reached "helpful" status in the Community Notes user interface are not being displayed on the public version of the X posts they are attached to.

Take this post for example (archived here):

cnotes0.jpg

In the list of posts with notes that are "Rated helpful" in the interface used by Community Notes contributors, this is currently the top one:

cnotes1.jpg

But instead of a list of the helpful notes that would normally appear under it there is just a link to "See all notes on this post".

That link goes here, if you are a Community Notes contributor you can see it. That page clearly shows there is at least one note voted helpful:

cnotes2.jpg

However the note does not show up on the public facing version of the post as of this writing.

A sampling of the other posts on the "Rated helpful" tab shows the same pattern: no notes visible on the public posts but "helpful" notes being available behind the "See all notes on this post" link.

Community Notes users who click the three dots in the top right corner of a post and click the "Write a Community Note" button still get to see existing Community Notes on a post, indicating the notes are still there, they are just not being displayed publicly. It appears proposed notes also don't show up on public posts for Community Notes users at the moment, making it much harder for notes to acquire enough votes to allow the Community Notes algorithm to run its consensus algorithm.

Several users apparently reported seeing the same issue and complained about missing Community Notes, some as early as Saturday, May 24, 2025, three days ago:

As of this writing, the official @CommunityNotes account on X hasn't commented on the issue, the latest post currently dates back to May 20, 2025

After publication of this story the @CommunityNotes account posted following update (which we can't embed right now, it appears that feature is also still experiencing issues):

cnotes4.jpg

The issue may be related to a data center fire and associated downtime at X on May 24 that was reported by The Verge at the time.

Lead Stories has reached out via email to X's press contact address and will update this story once a reply is received.

Updates:

  • 2025-05-26T21:31:46Z 2025-05-26T21:31:46Z
    Added comment from @CommunityNotes

  Maarten Schenk

Maarten Schenk is the co-founder and COO/CTO of Lead Stories and an expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

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