Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced a widespread outage on Friday, with tens of thousands of users reporting problems accessing the service, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.
Reports of disruption surged around 10am Eastern Time, with more than 41,000 users in the United States flagging issues by 10:35am. Downdetector, which compiles user-submitted reports, noted that the actual number of affected users could be higher than recorded figures.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters. The disruption follows a similar outage earlier this week, when more than 28,000 reports were logged in the United States and over 8,000 in the United Kingdom.
The outage comes amid renewed scrutiny of Musk’s technology ventures, after his artificial intelligence company, xAI, restricted access to its Grok image-generation feature following global criticism over misuse of the tool.
The feature had drawn condemnation for allowing the creation of sexualised and explicit images, including content involving women and children. Previously available to all users on X with daily limits, Grok’s image tool was widely used to generate non-consensual images of minors, public figures and celebrities, raising concerns among regulators and advocacy groups.
In response, X said image generation and editing through Grok would now be limited to paying subscribers on the platform. However, the restriction does not currently apply to the standalone Grok application, which continues to allow image creation at the time of publication.
Elon Musk and X have condemned the misuse of the AI tool, saying violations of platform rules would be treated in the same manner as other illegal content. Governments and digital safety groups, however, continue to call for stronger safeguards around generative AI technologies.
The developments highlight growing challenges faced by social media companies as they balance rapid technological innovation with platform reliability, user safety and regulatory pressure.
