Abstract The structure of disordered materials is still not well understood because of insufficient experimental data. Indeed, diffraction patterns from disordered materials are very broad and can be described only in pairwise correlations because of the absence of translational symmetry. Brilliant hard x-rays from third-generation synchrotron radiation sources enable us to obtain high-quality diffraction data for disordered materials from ambient to high temperature and high pressure, which has significantly improved our grasp of the nature of order in disordered materials. Here, we introduce the progress in the instrumentation for hard x-ray beamlines at SPring-8 over the last 20 years with associated results and advanced data analysis techniques to understand the topology in disordered materials.