Rebuilding the global town square from scratch
Open a profile on X.com over a slow connection. On the old web app, you'd stare at the X logo for more than 22 seconds before the first post appeared. On the new one, it shows up in 2.7. That new web app replaces the three servers we used to run for people, search crawlers, and link previews with one. It already serves logged-out X.com and the pages search engines crawl. Signed-in X.com is next. We tested it with employees and testers on lite.x.com, and now we're moving signed-in people over slowly, one country at a time. X.com is the sixth most visited website in the world, according to Similarweb. Five engineers, working with AI coding agents, built the first version of its new web app in under six months. The team has grown as signed-in pages move over, and more than 20 people have committed to the app since the end of September. This post covers why we rebuilt X.com, how we're rolling it out country by country, and how the old and new apps compare today. It also covers the performa