Olympics blunder

The first Olympics blunder for Elon Musk's X has arrived

By Grant Marek

The 2024 Paris Games haven’t even started yet and Elon Musk’s X already has its first Olympics blunder.

Late Thursday, Musk’s social media platform began automatically adding custom emojis to hashtags that will likely be used when discussing various Olympic sports — for instance, #swimming got an emoji depicting someone swimming, #volleyball got a silhouette attempting a serve and #soccer got a player booting a ball. The issue that arose Thursday evening involved a hashtag for a newly added Olympic sport: breakdancing.

Rather than updating the hashtag #breakdancing, the emoji was appended to the hashtag for the official name of the event at the 2024 Games: #breaking. That meant innumerable tweets from prominent journalism outlets about actual, serious developing news stories (all beginning “#BREAKING”) had a breakdancer doing a handstand automatically added next to them.

On any normal news day, users very well could have missed it entirely. But as Thursday evening kicked off what may have been the largest IT outage in history after Microsoft had a global systems meltdown, the change to X became its own topic of discussion by Friday morning.

Shockingly, it’s not the first time the emoji has appeared on the platform. It debuted in 2018, when breakdancing was added as a new sport at the Buenos Aires Youth Olympics, and was similarly panned — albeit on a smaller scale — then. No one, it appears, addressed the issue in the past six years. As of Friday early afternoon, the hashtag was still automatically appending the breakdancer to it.

The Olympics’ opening ceremony on Paris’ River Seine is scheduled for July 26.