X down: Twitter not working in another major outage

After a spike of reports that X and Grok were down this morning, it appears that service has been largely restored as of Friday afternoon.

The bulk of the reports to Down Detector were logged between 10 and 11 am. By approximately 2pm, reports had dropped to fewer than 1,000 users experiencing service interruptions.

Down Detector collects reports from users, so its numbers may not fully reflect the experiences of all users of a given service.

On some tracking websites, such as Down Detector, Cloudflare appears to be struggling. It might be – but, if it is, then it does not appear to be affecting other sites.

The uptick in reports about Cloudflare may be because the X website is sometimes showing Cloudflare error messages. But those error messages make clear that the problem is at X.

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?”)

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.)

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.