Elon Musk's X down for tens of thousands of users

Liv McMahon
Technology reporter

X appears to be back up and running for many, but we are still not sure what may have caused this outage in the first place.

As we said earlier, previous instances of the platform going down have often been linked to wider outages – such as one impacting Cloudflare in November.

We have approached X for comment, but such requests to its main press email address are often met with an automated reply – which for some time was a poo emoji - or silence.

Elon Musk has, in the past, posted about the cause of notable X outages. But he doesn’t appear to have addressed this one so far.

In the past few minutes, an engineer who works for Musk has posted a well-known GIF of Elmo with hands raised in the air, surrounded by fire.

An hour earlier the same engineer, Christopher Stanley, posted the word "testing".

It's a mixed picture for X users, with some still seeing signs of the platform struggling.

It’s always tricky to know when an outage might be completely over, but the number of Downdetector reports of problems at X are much lower than their peak earlier on.

With that, we're now bringing our live coverage to an end.

Liv McMahon
Technology reporter

The issues affecting X this afternoon have also seemingly been impacting Grok.

Grok is Elon Musk’s chatbot that replies to users on his social media platform and can generate text and images in its own app and site.

There were more than 2,000 reports from Grok users flagging issues to Downdetector.com – its portal for users outside the UK.

Why has Grok been in the news this week?

The issues facing X today come amid a week of intense scrutiny for Musk, X and indeed Grok after the tool was used to generate sexualised deepfake imagery of people on the social media platform.

The UK government had said it would support the regulator Ofcom in investigating the firm and using its "full powers" - including potentially seeking to ban the platform - to hold the company to account.

Despite X outlining measures to stop Grok editing images of real women to present them in bikinis or revealing clothing on its platform, Ofcom is still investigating if it broke UK law.

Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of Elon Musk's children, has also since sued his firm xAI over sexualised deepfakes of her created on X.

Liv McMahon
Technology reporter

The frenzied nature of web outages and engineers hurrying to fix them often means by the time we’ve started reporting on them, they’re already over.

There’s some suggestion that could be the case with X this afternoon – as reports to Downdetector dip, Google searches fall and fresh X posts start finally reappearing on users' feeds.

But the platform has been wobbling over the past hour or so, likely compounded by people rushing to check whether it’s working.

Users of the X app and desktop site have been met intermittently with posts failing to load across its For You and Following feeds.

Something experts have suggested to me in the past is issues causing platforms to fall over on Fridays may take longer to resolve because there are fewer staff on hand to patch problems - with many firms having policies in place to not ship software changes as the weekend nears.

The outage in July 2024 caused by a faulty update from software company Crowdstrike, that knocked PCs offline worldwide, was one such Friday incident many IT workers and developers won’t forget in a hurry.

Tom Singleton
Technology reporter

Outages are, by their nature, unpredictable.

That is why they cause so much disruption, as services we have all come to rely on grind to a sudden and unexplained halt. But, at the same time, the likelihood of them happening is going up, experts say.

That's partly because we do more and more online, meaning there is more to go wrong.

But it's also because our ever more complex digital lives depend on physical infrastructure that is more shonky than we might like to admit.

Or as one expert told the BBC, the brave new world of AI and chatbots is built upon "a fabric of really old technology".

We don't know what caused this outage, but one thing we can be confident of: it won't be the last.

• Why is tech going down more?

Liv McMahon
Technology reporter

Elon Musk’s platform X appears to be down across both its app and website.

There have been thousands of reports from users to platform outage monitor Downdetector of people struggling to see new posts on X’s feeds.

In the UK, Downdetector saw a spike of around 20,000 reports suggesting the platform had gone down shortly after 15:00 GMT on Friday.

The issues appear to be ongoing, with another huge spike in reports seen shortly before 16:00 GMT as X's timelines flicker between resuming and failing to load fully.

We're waiting to find out what's been causing the widespread X outage.

Reuters is reporting multiple countries are affected, including the US, Canada, Australia and the UK.

Citing data from Downdetector.com, the news agency reports that nearly 78,000 users are unable to access X in the United States, nearly 18,000 in the UK, more than 8,000 in Canada and over 6,000 in Australia.

Elon Musk's social media network X is down for tens of thousands of users internationally, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

This is a breaking news story - we'll bring you the latest as we get it.