Computers & internet

X Temporarily Experiences Two Outages

Were the outages consequences of Elon Musk's policies or quickly resolved technical issues?

FEB 17·Updated FEB 18

Story

Above: Social media platform X logo is seen on a smartphone screen. Image credit: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

The Facts

Elon Musk's social media platform X experienced two separate brief outages on Monday, with tens of thousands of users affected worldwide as they were met with "something went wrong" messages in both app and web versions.
Forbes
TechRadar
TESLARATI
According to Downdetector, which tracks service disruptions based on user reports, the first outage took place between 8:25 a.m. ET and 9:25 a.m., with reports peaking above 41,000 at 8:40 a.m., while the second occurred between 1:10 p.m. and 1:25 p.m., with a peak of 22,000 reports.
Downdetector
X had provided no official explanation for the disruptions as of Tuesday, though the company's incident history page confirms two site-wide outages due to API endpoint degradation on Monday — one of which was still ongoing.
TechRadar
Internet Archive
Issues with the social media platform, or at least most of them, seem to have been resolved by Monday afternoon.
Forbes
The New York Times
This is the third X outage this year, following similar disruptions on Jan. 13 and Jan. 16, and many other such incidents last year, including in connection with widespread Cloudflare outages and a reported massive cyberattack with IP addresses originating in Ukraine.
Forbes
FOX News
USA Today
Questions emerged on whether issues with X were a downstream effect amid reports that Cloudflare was experiencing technical issues too. However, the company's CEO, Matthew Prince, said that Cloudflare had no outage on Monday.
The New York Times
Newsweek
ZeroHedge
Matthew Prince on X

Sources Split

LEFT

CENTER

RIGHT

ESTAB
CRIT

CENTER

PRO
ESTAB

The Spin

Narrative A

X has suffered massive worldwide outages, failing to respond to inquiries about the cause or duration of the disruption. This marks yet another failure for the troubled social media platform that has already faced sweeping staff reductions, an advertiser exodus and AI controversies.

The Register

Narrative B

X experienced a temporary technical issue that was quickly identified and resolved, with access being restored to users. The X team handled the outage efficiently and the platform is back online serving its users.