Elon Musk’s “X” is down for thousands around the World
Synopsis
On Friday, 16th January, 2026 the internet network ‘X’ suffered a global outage for more than 77,000 users across the world with an overdrive in reports from the US, UK and India. Users complained of not being able to access timelines or the Grok chatbot. This is the second time in three days that Elon Musk’s site has run into major technical issues. Service started to be restored gradually about an hour later, but the company has not yet said what caused the large-scale outage.
Breaking News: X (formerly known as Twitter) was not working for tens of thousands of people around the world on Friday. According to Downdetector, a website that tracks when websites break, and experience issues, reports started coming in during the afternoon and evening.
At its height, more than 77,000 people in the United States reported problems and thousands more were left unable to see new posts in the UK, India and Canada. The site has suffered a major technical issue for the second time in less than a week, after experiencing an identical blowout on Tuesday.
What Users Are Seeing
A lot of people who tried to use the app or website discovered that their “timeline,” or list of new posts, would not load. Rather than news and updates, users were instead greeted with messages like “Something went wrong” or “Cannot retrieve posts.”
• App Problems: Among people who experienced glitches, more than half said that the mobile app was not working.
• Website Problems: Several other people said the desktop website did not load their profile or photos.
• The “Grok” Factor: Not even Grok, the intelligent chatbot that’s a part of the platform, had anything to say in response to questions at the height of this outage.
Why Does This Keep Happening?
As websites such as X grow more complicated, small errors in their computer code can cause a huge crash, technology specialists said. Others speculate that because it’s a Friday there may be fewer workers at the office who could fix bugs right away.
Others say the site is built on old technology and can’t handle the sheer volume of data now posted. Though X has yet to officially address what the cause of the crash is, for some users, around an hour after problems first began occurring, the site began to pop back up with signs of life again.
A Week of Technical Trouble
This new crash comes in a series of rough months for the platform. This week already, over 28,000 users experienced a similar blackout. In either instance, others were quick to take to other websites and ask if the problem was being felt everywhere else, confirming that the “wobble” as it became known had been experienced in nearly every country. The repeated crashes are providing a lot of frustration for the X crowd, many use it to get real-time news.
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