X down – latest: Twitter and Grok not working in another major outage
Technical issues come amid widespread criticism of Elon Musk’s platform
X, formerly Twitter, experienced a major outage on Friday morning.
By Friday afternoon, service appears to have restored for many users.
Those affected reported that the site and its app did not load at all, with visitors instead saw a blank screen. Some users also saw Cloudflare error pages – though the issue was at X itself, and the problem did not seem to be a repeat of recent Cloudflare technical issues that did take X offline.
Often, during outages at X, the site itself will load but it will show no posts.
Tracking website Down Detector showed a huge spike in reports of problems at X at around 3pm in the UK, or 10am eastern time.
The issues appeared to be present right across the world and on the various ways of accessing X, such as its website and mobile apps.
X service restored, blog is now paused
As of Friday afternoon, X and Grok service appear to be restored for a majority of users.
Stay with The Independent for more breaking news.
Hello and welcome...
... to our live coverage of a major outage at X, formerly Twitter, as well as on its Grok AI chatbot.
X does not have a status platform for updates
Unlike many other platforms, X does not operate a public-facing status page to give updates on outages and other problems. It does have one for its developer platform, which claimed during the outage that “all systems are operational”.
This week's problems follow widespread criticism of Grok chatbot
The outage follows another major technical issue at X this week. Both come amid loud criticism of the Elon Musk-owned platform, and its chatbot Grok, over the fact that it was creating violent and abusive images, often of women and children.
Grok – which is also available in a standalone form, in addition to being accessible as an account on X – also went down in the outage. While the chatbot would occasionally appear to load, it showed an array of error messages.
Musk takeover brought fears of outages – but it has largely stayed online
When Mr Musk bought what was then Twitter, in 2022, there were widespread worries that his decision to fire the majority of the company’s staff would stop the site from working as usual. In the time since, however, X has largely stayed online though it has intermittently experienced technical issues.
Latest on X outage
Here’s the latest from our sister site, Bulletin, if you’d like to read about the outage in brief.
Outage appears to be intermittent
Occasionally, and anecdotally, the site appears to have come back a few times in the hour or so that it’s been down. But then it breaks again. The outage appears to be intermittent for now.
Site might work on some devices and not others
(Anecdotal, again, as below.) Right now, Twitter appears to be working for me on my phone, but not on my desktop. If you need to get online, it might be worth trying on another device or app.
X appears to be coming back – slowly
It is still slow and unreliable, but X appears to be coming back slightly. Reports of problems are reducing, and anecdotally it appears to be loading. (And there are lots of new posts there when it does, so other people must be able to get online, too.)
Musk and X accounts silent on outage
The official X accounts of both X itself and its owner Elon Musk are yet to post about the outage. The latter has posted – about the kind of political issues that largely dominate his feed these days – but not addressed the problem.
(Still, on his most recent post, the first reply that shows for me is someone asking “What’s up with the app?”)
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