Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, and its artificial intelligence service Grok suffered a major global outage on Friday morning, Jan 16, leaving the services unstable for many users.
The disruption began to spike on Downdetector shortly after 10:00 a.m. ET, while Cisco’s ThousandEyes outage map recorded problems with more than 600 X servers across the globe, reports Mashable.
Users attempting to access the site via both Twitter.com and X.com addresses reported Cloudflare connection errors or blank feeds that initially failed to display any posts.
Internal error messages informed users that “something went wrong,” with some seeing the prompt, “but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot,” while others were advised to “Try reloading”. It remains unclear what caused the failure, and the platform has not yet responded to requests for comment.
The platform and its app started returning online for some users around 11:00 a.m. ET, with reports of recovery noted by 11:21 a.m. ET. However, the service remained erratic and failed to work normally for hours, frequently displaying error messages and failing to load the most recent posts or updated feeds.
As of 11:09pm GMT+6, the platform was still reportedly experiencing issues.
This disruption follows a relatively brief outage earlier in the same week. The incident occurred during a period of multiple network failures, including a significant outage at Verizon on Jan 15, which left users across the United States without cell service.
On alternative platforms such as Bluesky, users reacted to the downtime with mockery, with some engaging in song title games and others suggesting it was “Bluesky’s chance to shine.”
Some users highlighted ongoing concerns regarding the platform’s right-wing shift and the misuse of the Grok AI tool to generate non-consensual sexual images as factors in their decision to migrate away from X.
