San Francisco, January 16: The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced a significant global outage on Friday, January 16, leaving thousands of users unable to access their feeds or post updates. This marks the second time in less than seven days that the Elon Musk-owned platform has faced technical disruptions, raising concerns over its infrastructure stability.

According to the real-time monitoring site Downdetector, reports of service issues began to surge around 8:30 pm IST (10:00 am ET). At the peak of the disruption, more than 45,000 users in the United States and thousands more across the United Kingdom, India, and Canada reported that the platform was failing to load. X Down: Global Outage Hits Elon Musk-Run Social Media Platform As Thousands Report Disruptions to Feeds and Logins.

Users attempting to access X via web browsers often encountered "503 Service Unavailable" or Cloudflare error messages, while mobile app users reported blank timelines and an inability to send direct messages.

A Pattern of Technical Struggles

This latest incident follows a similar widespread outage on Tuesday, January 13. During that event, service was down for several hours before engineers were able to restore functionality. While X has not yet issued a formal statement regarding the cause of Friday's failure, industry analysts suggest the recurring issues may be linked to internal server transitions or instabilities within underlying cloud infrastructure. Elon Musk Sharply Criticises Apple-Google AI Deal, Calls It ‘Unreasonable Concentration of Power’ of Tech Giants.

Growing Impact on Users

The frequent downtime has sparked frustration among the platform's user base, particularly as the site remains a primary source for real-time news and communication. Along with the main social feed, the platform's AI chatbot, Grok, was also reportedly inaccessible for many during the outage.

As of late Friday evening, service began to stabilize for some regions, though many users continue to report intermittent connectivity and slow loading times.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jan 16, 2026 09:22 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).