On Friday morning, the social media site X (formerly Twitter) owned by Elon Musk was offline as reports of an outage spiked. Within about 90 minutes, the issue seemed to have been resolved.
The outage reporting site Downdetector showed reports shooting up starting just before 7 a.m. PT (10 a.m. ET) to a peak of more than 50,000. Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, also showed a surge at the same time, though in a smaller volume. (Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
Internet service companies Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services also showed small bumps in outage reports.
The outage at X comes as the company faces intense scrutiny over nonconsensual sexualized images generated by Grok and shared on X.
Where the outage hit hardest
By Jon Skillings
Downdetector says the top affected cities included Tokyo, New York City, Osaka, Chicago and Yokohama. The US accounted for the highest number of reports (more than 184,000), followed by Japan (129,000) and the UK (42,000). The peak window was 15:13 to 15:24 UTC, which translates to 10:13-10:24 a.m. ET and 7:13-7:24 a.m. PT.
Twitter back online
By Jon Skillings
At this point, just before 11:30 a.m. ET, I’m once again able to access X on both desktop and mobile. That wasn’t the case in the preceding hour.
X outage reports spike
By Jon Skillings
Just before 10 a.m. ET on Friday, outage reports spiked at Downdetector for the social media site X (aka Twitter). As of this writing, the volume has reached more than 50,000 and climbing.