Elon Musk’s social media platform X experienced a major outage on Friday, leaving tens of thousands of users across multiple countries unable to access the service.
According to outage-monitoring site Downdetector, reports of problems surged shortly after 15:00 GMT. In the UK alone, around 20,000 users reported issues, while Reuters cited nearly 78,000 affected users in the United States, 18,000 in the UK, more than 8,000 in Canada and over 6,000 in Australia.
Users on both the X app and desktop site reported feeds failing to load, with timelines repeatedly flickering between working and going offline. Although reports later began to fall and posts gradually reappeared for many, the platform continued to struggle intermittently for over an hour.
By late afternoon, X appeared to be back online for a large number of users. However, the company has not confirmed what caused the disruption. X has been approached for comment, but media enquiries often receive no response or automated replies. Elon Musk, who has previously addressed major outages on the platform, has not publicly commented on this incident.
An engineer associated with Musk, Christopher Stanley, posted the word “testing” earlier in the day, followed later by a well-known GIF of Elmo surrounded by flames with raised hands — a post many interpreted as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the outage.
The disruption also appeared to affect Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot integrated into X. Downdetector recorded more than 2,000 reports from Grok users experiencing problems.
The outage comes during a turbulent week for X and Grok. The chatbot has faced criticism after being used to generate sexualised deepfake images on the platform. UK regulators have said they are supporting Ofcom in investigating whether X breached the law, and legal action has reportedly been taken against Musk’s AI company, xAI, over deepfake content.
Technology experts note that outages are becoming more common as digital services grow increasingly complex and rely on aging infrastructure. Problems occurring late in the week can also take longer to fix, as fewer engineers may be available and companies often avoid deploying changes ahead of weekends.
While service has largely been restored, the exact cause of the outage remains unknown — and experts warn such incidents are likely to happen again.
