Visitors to X in many major cities on Friday were greeted with an error message. “Something went wrong,” it read. “Try reloading.”
The widespread outage of the social media service was noted by the website DownDetector, which indicated more than 53,000 user reports as of 10:45 a.m. ET.
“Posts aren’t loading right now. Try again,” mobile app users affected by the outage were told.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and rebranded it as X, it has operated with less transparency than its previous, publicly traded incarnation did. Inquiries to a press email did not elicit an initial response, and the company generally communicates via X.
Outages have plagued X before, with notable ones occurring in 2022 and 2023.
Cloudflare, a provider of the internet infrastructure behind many large digital brands, was experiencing issues that some press reports tied to the X situation. DownDetector reported fielding nearly 600 reports of outages between 9:30 and 10:30 a.m. ET.
Major U.S. markets like New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston and Chicago have been affected by the X outage, with problems also cropping up in the UK and Europe.
X, which was merged with xAI last year as former CEO Linda Yaccarino departed, has experienced other issues in recent days. Grok, the AI chatbot made available to X users, prompted massive backlash this week when it was found to be enabling sexually explicit deepfake images. The chatbot was subsequently limited to paid subscribers of X, though lawmakers in the UK have called for severe consequences.
