When I went to the social media platform Truth Social Thursday evening to see if Donald Trump was reacting to President Biden’s stunningly divisive State of the Union speech, I was greeted with a white screen.

Turns out Truth wasn’t the only site that went down during the diatribe – reports are that a slew of government and media sites were affected as well. Most are back up as of this writing, but the cause for the outages has not been determined.

Some US government websites are back online, some are still down pic.twitter.com/TAqvBTpnxh

— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) March 8, 2024

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was one of those affected:

DEVELOPING: Federal Government websites go down as Biden deliver's SOTU address; cause unknown pic.twitter.com/DzSHE8I1cO

— Salem News Channel (@WatchSalemNews) March 8, 2024

As was DHS, the Secret Service, and others:

Websites down right now:
- Homeland Security (DHS)
- Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
- Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE)
- Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
- U.S. Secret Service
- Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) https://t.co/a9lgVFGAjY

— BNO News Live (@BNODesk) March 8, 2024

Users complained they couldn’t log into Truth Social or see new posts:

Donald Trump's Truth social media platform appears to be down amid outages during Joe Biden State of the Union address.

According to a chart crafted by Down Detector, MAGA supporters began to experience outages around 9 pm tonight. Truth Social appeared to be running smoothly throughout the day. Users began complaining on the website, each sharing a different problem they encountered with the app tonight.

"Truth won't allow me to follow… I tried clearing my browsing history and cache but that doesn't work." Some users also complained about seeing only "old posts and ads" while some said the app wouldn't load for them at all.

Naturally, theories about what happened are cropping up everywhere:

Another user shared his two theories as to why the app has gone down. The first, he explained, could be due to the overwhelming engagement tonight from Trump supporters across the nation. The second, a hacker could have performed a distributed denial of service(DDOS) in a cyber attack aimed to disrupt activity on the app.

"Too much love or a DDOS attack is my guess," the user who goes by Chris Martin on DownDetector.com. The tech issues come two days after the former president trounced former UN ambassador Nikki Haley in the Super Tuesday contest this week, ultimately edging her out of the race.

Trump had announced early on Thursday that he would be fact-checking Biden’s speech in real-time: 

“I am pleased to inform you that tomorrow night we will be doing a LIVE, Play by Play, of Crooked Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address,” Trump said in his Wednesday announcement. “I will correct, in rapid response, any and all inaccurate Statements, especially pertaining to the Border and his Weaponization of the DOJ, FBI, A.G.s, and District Attorneys, to go after his Political Opponent, ME (something never done before in this Country!). We did this once before to tremendous success – Beating All Records. It is important for the Country to get the TRUTH!”

It will be interesting to see if we ever get an explanation for these outages.