Elon Musk's social media platform X experienced a widespread service failure on Friday, 16th January 2026, leaving tens of thousands of users around the world unable to access the service.
Scale of the Disruption
According to data from the outage tracking website Downdetector.com, the problems began to spike in the afternoon. In the United States alone, there were 77,732 reported issues with the platform. The impact was also sharply felt in the United Kingdom, where users reported more than 13,600 problems at 3.24pm GMT. Reports remained high, with over 10,200 further issues logged just half an hour later at 3.54pm.
India was another significantly affected region, with more than 3,000 issues reported. It is important to note that these figures, based on user-submitted reports, likely represent only a portion of the total users affected, meaning the actual scale of the outage could be far greater.
A History of Recent Instability
This is not an isolated incident for the platform formerly known as Twitter. In November of the previous year, an outage at Cloudflare, the company's internet security provider, briefly prevented access to X. That disruption was caused by a faulty security configuration that crashed its traffic system.
Merely a few days after that event, another technical problem took X offline for thousands of users in America. This pattern of disruptions raises questions about the platform's underlying infrastructure and reliability for its global user base.
What Happens Next?
As a breaking news story, further details regarding the cause of Friday's outage are expected to be released by X's engineering teams. The company has yet to issue an official statement on the root cause of the latest service failure. Users globally are advised to check the platform's official status channels for updates.
The repeated nature of these outages highlights the fragility of major digital platforms upon which millions rely for communication and news. For the latest updates on this and other breaking news stories, ensure you have alerts enabled.
