Elon Musk's social media platform X experienced a widespread service disruption on Friday, 16 January 2026, leaving tens of thousands of users across the globe unable to access core features.
Scale of the Global Disruption
The outage, which began in the afternoon, impacted users in multiple countries including Britain, the United States, India, and Australia. Data from the outage tracking website Downdetector.com revealed the extent of the problem. In the United States alone, more than 79,000 users reported issues with the platform.
In the UK, the problems peaked after 3pm. Downdetector recorded over 13,600 incident reports at 3.24pm, followed by another 10,200 reports at 3.54pm. Significant numbers were also reported elsewhere, with over 3,000 users in India and more than 2,700 in Australia experiencing difficulties.
What Users Experienced
Affected users found themselves locked out of key functions of the X platform. The primary issues reported included:
- An inability to load the main timeline or feed.
- Problems sending replies in direct messages.
- Repeated error messages stating "Something went wrong. Try reloading".
User reports submitted to Downdetector highlighted the frustration. "Unable to reply to chat messages as keeps showing disconnected, feed not updating," one user stated. Another simply said, "Can't load posts." One individual noted recurring problems, mentioning, "Had problems several days ago and now it's not loading 'My Messages', 'Following' or 'For You'."
It is important to note that the figures from Downdetector are based on user-submitted reports, meaning the actual number of people affected by the X outage was likely higher.
Recovery and Recent Context
By late afternoon, the platform appeared to be gradually restoring service for many users. This incident is not an isolated one for X. In November of the previous year, a Cloudflare outage briefly prevented access after a faulty security configuration crashed its traffic system. Another disruption took the platform offline for thousands of American users just a few days later.
The latest outage occurred shortly after X implemented changes to its AI tool, Grok, designed to prevent the generation of non-consensual imagery. The platform has faced a series of operational and controversial challenges in recent months.
