The latest global outage of Elon Musk's X app on Thursday sparked a wave of complaints and memes in the US. Ironically, the delay also affected many users in China, a country that has technically restricted access to the service for more than a decade.

On the Chinese microblogging website Weibo, the hashtag "Twitter down" quickly shot to the top of the trending chart, staying there for over two hours. The hashtag garnered 190 million views and spawned 50 pages of posts, along with thousands of related comments. Despite continued restrictions by cyber regulators in Beijing, this swift response reflected the popularity of both Twitter and X among the Chinese public.

Twitter's reach in China has been limited since 2009, the same year Weibo was launched and two years before the introduction of WeChat, the all-inclusive Chinese app. To access Twitter's unfiltered timelines, individuals in China must use a government-sanctioned virtual private network (VPN).

Beijing has maintained tight control over public opinion, viewing Western social media apps such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as potentially challenging government rhetoric or enabling open debate on public policy issues. Registration for Weibo and WeChat requires real identification and traceable phone numbers.

China says Western social media apps are not banned in the country; Rather, it was the decision of these companies not to comply with Chinese Internet regulations. Despite this, the highly regulated online environment is thriving, with WeChat reaching 1.3 billion monthly active users this year, surpassing both Weibo and X.

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The surge in complaints on Weibo provides a rare glimpse into the Chinese public's willingness to bypass the "Great Firewall," even if it means using an official VPN. X and Twitter operate under different rules than Weibo, where censorship algorithms regularly delete comments and block sensitive hashtags in favor of Beijing-approved statements, free speech and the free flow of information.

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Following Chinese government sanctions in 2009, state agencies largely avoided American social media apps. However, in 2019, there was a notable increase in Twitter registrations by Chinese government departments, diplomats, state media outlets, journalists and commentators. This marks a shift in Beijing's strategy to use these platforms to spread Chinese Communist Party ideology globally.

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Despite the increase in official Chinese accounts on Twitter, the government continues to crack down on Chinese citizens using X, even sending some to detention centers for posts critical of the government.