Elon Musk’s social media platform X experienced its second major outage of the week, with widespread service disruptions affecting both the website and mobile app. Users reported that the platform either failed to load entirely or briefly displayed content before crashing and returning error messages, indicating systemic instability rather than isolated glitches.
According to outage-tracking service Down Detector, reports of the disruption began around 10 a.m. Eastern time and quickly surged to nearly 80,000 complaints. At the time of reporting, the platform had not fully recovered, suggesting a prolonged technical issue rather than a short-lived interruption. The scope and scale of the outage point to problems affecting core infrastructure rather than regional or user-specific failures.
This incident follows another significant outage earlier in the same week, intensifying scrutiny over the platform’s technical resilience. The disruption also comes amid heightened criticism of X over content moderation and platform safety, particularly after reports that Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Musk’s xAI and integrated into X, had been used to generate or manipulate images of real individuals—including women and minors—into nonconsensual sexual and violent content.
Concerns about X’s ability to maintain stable operations and enforce safeguards have persisted since Musk acquired the company in 2022. Following the takeover, large-scale layoffs significantly reduced the company’s workforce, including engineering and trust-and-safety teams. At the time, critics warned that the cuts could undermine both platform reliability and the capacity to effectively moderate harmful content. While X has largely continued to operate since then, it has experienced several notable outages over the past year, raising ongoing questions about the long-term impact of those staffing reductions on system stability and oversight.