In the past, major X disruptions have often been tied to broader internet issues, including a Cloudflare outage last November. This time, the company has not shared any official details. Requests sent to X’s main press email typically receive either an automated response or no reply at all. At one point, that auto reply was famously just a poo emoji.
Elon Musk has previously commented on high profile outages, but so far he has stayed silent on this one. The only hint of activity came from one of his engineers, Christopher Stanley, who posted a popular GIF of Elmo surrounded by flames with his hands in the air. About an hour earlier, he simply posted the word “testing.”
The disruption did not stop with X. Users also reported problems with Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot that operates on the platform and through its own app and website. More than 2,000 Grok related complaints were logged on Downdetector from users outside the UK.
This outage comes during a rough week for Musk, X, and Grok. The chatbot has been under heavy criticism after being used to generate sexualised deepfake images of people on the platform. The UK government said it would back regulator Ofcom in using its full powers to investigate the company, including the possibility of banning the service. Even though X said it had introduced measures to stop Grok from editing images of real women into revealing outfits, Ofcom is still looking into whether UK law was broken.
By the time outages like this are widely reported, they are often already starting to fade. That may be what happened here. Reports on Downdetector began to fall, Google searches dropped, and fresh posts slowly started showing up again in users’ feeds. Still, the platform remained unstable for over an hour, likely made worse by millions of people repeatedly checking to see if it was working again.
Users on both the app and desktop site saw posts fail to load across the For You and Following feeds. Tech experts have long pointed out that outages on Fridays can take longer to fix, since many companies avoid pushing software changes close to the weekend and have fewer staff on hand.
That brings back memories of the July 2024 outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update, which took PCs offline across the world. It was another Friday incident many IT workers still talk about.
These failures are so disruptive because so much of daily life depends on online services that can suddenly stop without warning. Experts also warn that outages may become more common as our digital lives grow more complex and rely on aging physical infrastructure. As one expert put it, much of today’s AI driven world is still built on very old technology.
What exactly caused this X outage remains unknown. What is clear is that it will not be the last.
Earlier on Friday, Elon Musk’s platform went down across both its app and website. Downdetector recorded tens of thousands of reports from users who could not see new posts. In the UK alone, around 20,000 reports came in shortly after 15:00 GMT, followed by another spike just before 16:00 as timelines briefly returned and then failed again.
Reuters reported that the outage affected multiple countries, including the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Nearly 78,000 users in the US, about 18,000 in the UK, over 8,000 in Canada, and more than 6,000 in Australia reported problems accessing the platform.
According to Downdetector, tens of thousands of users worldwide were impacted as X struggled to stay online.
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