X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has been hit by another significant technical failure, leaving users around the world unable to access the service.
Global Platform Failure
The outage began at approximately 3pm UK time (10am Eastern Time) on Friday, 16 January 2026. Both the X website and its mobile applications failed to load properly for a vast number of users. Instead of the usual feed, many were confronted with a blank screen, while others encountered error messages from Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company.
It is important to note that the root cause of the problem was with X itself, and not a repeat of recent separate issues involving Cloudflare. During previous outages, the X interface has often loaded but displayed no posts. This incident was more severe, with the platform failing to load at all for many.
Tracking the Disruption
The scale of the problem was immediately evident on the independent tracking service, Down Detector, which registered a huge spike in user reports from the UK and internationally. The issues appeared to be widespread, affecting all major methods of accessing the platform.
Unlike many other large technology firms, X does not maintain a public status page to inform users about service disruptions. The company does operate one for its developer platform, which paradoxically stated that "all systems are operational" throughout the outage.
Outage Amidst Mounting Scrutiny
This is the second major technical problem to affect X this week. The failures occur against a backdrop of intense criticism directed at owner Elon Musk and the platform's AI chatbot, Grok. Recent reports have condemned Grok for generating violent and abusive imagery, often targeting women and children.
When Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, his decision to dismiss a large majority of the company's staff raised widespread concerns about the platform's future stability and ability to operate normally. While X has largely remained online since then, it has been plagued by intermittent technical issues, fueling ongoing debate about the impact of the company's restructuring under its new leadership.
