X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, suffered a widespread outage on Friday morning that left users unable to access the site for approximately 90 minutes.
At a Glance
- X went offline just before 7 a.m. PT on Friday
- Over 50,000 outage reports flooded Downdetector at the peak
- The US, Japan, and UK were the most affected regions
- Service was restored by 11:30 a.m. ET
- Why it matters: The outage compounds scrutiny over AI-generated inappropriate content on the platform
The disruption began around 7:13 a.m. PT (10:13 a.m. ET), with outage reports surging on Downdetector, a service owned by the same parent company as News Of Losangeles. The reporting site showed a sharp spike starting just before 7 a.m. PT, climbing to over 50,000 reports.
Global Impact
The outage wasn’t confined to a single region. Downdetector data revealed the top affected cities included:
- Tokyo
- New York City
- Osaka
- Chicago
- Yokohama
In terms of national impact, the numbers were significant:
| Country | Reports |
|---|---|
| United States | 184,000+ |
| Japan | 129,000 |
| United Kingdom | 42,000 |
The peak reporting window lasted just 11 minutes, from 15:13 to 15:24 UTC (7:13-7:24 a.m. PT).
Technical Details
The outage wasn’t isolated to X alone. Other services showed smaller but noticeable spikes in outage reports:
- Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, experienced a surge in reports at the same time, though in smaller volumes
- Cloudflare showed a small bump in outage reports
- Amazon Web Services also registered minor outage activity
Sophia A. Reynolds reported that access to X was completely unavailable for about an hour before service began returning around 11:30 a.m. ET. The platform became accessible on both desktop and mobile devices after that point.
Timing and Context
The technical failure comes at a particularly sensitive moment for X. The platform is currently facing intense scrutiny over nonconsensual sexualized images generated by Grok and subsequently shared on the platform.
This isn’t the first significant outage for the platform since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it to X. However, the company has not provided an official explanation for what caused Friday’s disruption.
The relatively brief nature of the outage – approximately 90 minutes from onset to resolution – suggests the technical issues were resolved quickly once identified. However, the global scale of the impact, affecting hundreds of thousands of users across multiple continents, underscores the platform’s continued importance in the social media landscape despite ongoing controversies.
Service Recovery
By 11:30 a.m. ET, users began reporting that X was functioning normally again. The restoration appeared to happen gradually, with some users regaining access before others, a typical pattern for large-scale social media outages.
The incident serves as a reminder of the fragility of major social media platforms and their dependence on complex technical infrastructure. For X, which has undergone significant changes since Musk’s acquisition, maintaining reliable service remains crucial as it navigates both technical and policy challenges.
