Welp, this is awkward.
Marks the Spot
So much for the big X rollout!
As Futurism staffers, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, and other writers have discovered,
The hastily-announced rollout of the rebrand, which Elon says will involve changing the name of Twitter to X and changing its web address from Twitter.com to X.com, is apparently hitting some major snags. Why? For many people, X.com redirects to a GoDaddy landing page instead of the $44 billion social network.
“X.com is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com,” reads the error message received by a substantial number of users.
While X.com does indeed redirect to Twitter for some folks, others still are getting neither the intended site nor the GoDaddy message. Instead, they’re getting a secret third thing: an error message that either says the site cannot be reached or that there is “a typo in .twitter.com.”
X-Rated
Twitter/X owner Elon Musk has a history with the letter, which was previously used for the online banking service he co-founded that eventually became Paypal.
As tech thinker Paris Marx notes, Musk really, really wanted Paypal to be called “X” — so much so that although he was pushed out following the company’s merger with Peter Thiel’s Confinity startup and subsequently ousted in the year 2000, he not only reacquired the X.com domain name in 2017, but also floated the idea of re-acquiring Paypal so that he could call it “X.” (And let’s not get into the fact that one of his many kids is named a string of letters and numbers starting with the letter X.)
Thus far, neither Musk nor new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino have said, er, jack about the glaring error, and when we reached out to Twitter’s press email for response, we received an automated message about someone getting back to us soon — which is, at least, better than the poop emoji auto-reply that predated the new chief executive’s installation.
More on Elon’s antics: Elon Musk Says Universe May Be Twice as Old as We Think, Dark Matter Seems “Sketch”
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