Reports started to emerge earlier today that Elon Musk's X platform was experiencing an unplanned outage. A huge spike appeared on the DownDetector website (where users submit reports of problems) starting around 10am ET / 7am PT / 3pm ET on Friday, January 16.
The problems became apparent when no content would load for users either on the desktop or mobile version of X.com. The start of this year has been anything but smooth for X, as the platform has already come under fire for Musk's AI chatbot Grok sexualizing images of women without consent.
Thankfully, today's outage didn't appear as serious or long-lasting as the one that knocked the service offline in 2025. Today's problems resolved themselves after around an hour and half for users in both the U.S. and the U.K.
Tom's Guide followed along with the events as they took place and you can see a recap of how it unfolded below.
A dramatic spike
Over 2,000 reports appeared on DownDetector in a little over 20 minutes, indicating that a lot of users are having problems with the service right now.
Tweets not loading
We don't have any official confirmation of a problem but there's definitely an issue with the site that Tom's Guide has been able to replicate.
While X.com loads up, no tweets are displayed — as you can see in the screenshot above. When we try refreshing the page, it leads to a 503 error. Which is usually related to either a server being overloaded or being down for maintenance. Stay tuned...
Even if X wanted to comment, how would they?
X.com has an engineering team, who are usually quick to comment with a statement along the lines of: "X is aware some of our users are experiencing performance issues on the platform today. We are experiencing a data center outage and the team is actively working to remediate the issue."
However, these are usually posted on its official feed — which I can't see right now because my posts aren't loading. So we're in the dark unless they want to start posting to Facebook, Bluesky or TikTok. Which seems unlikely.
Reports are climbing higher — past 60k
Ok, this looks to be something more serious now. What started out as 2,000 reports on DownDetector has swiftly climbed past 60,000 at the time of writing.
When Twitter (sorry, X) previously went down in 2025 it was due to a fire that broke out at a data center in Hillsboro, Oregon.
Lightning doesn't usually strike twice but it remains to be seen if this is just a blip or something more serious.
Twitter redirect switched off?
An interesting little detail I've just noticed is that usually, when you navigate to "Twitter.com" you're redirected to X. At present, that's not working — all you'll get is the connection timeout.
But if you go to X.com itself and sign in, you'll see your profile just without any content. Maybe X has decided to turn off the redirect altogether?
Tweets are still not loading
Tom's Guide has staff based in both the U.S. and the U.K. and we can confirm that on both sides of the pond, tweets are still failing to load.
However, the reports over at DownDetector seem to be on the decline. Climbing up to a peak of nearly 75,000 around 25 minutes ago, they've currently falling down below 40k. Perhaps the team at X.com have figured out the cause of the problem.
I wouldn't expect credit if you're on X Premium
This isn't the only outage we've seen happen this week. On Wednesday, phone network Verizon tanked for hours on end, leaving customers staring down at the SOS screen on their phones. In response, Verizon promised $20 credit to everyone affected in order to make amends. Here's how to claim it, by the way.
I wouldn't hold my breath for any similar gestures for paying X Premium membership affected by today's problems.
Anyone want to buy Twitter.com?
A further development in the mystery of why Twitter.com is failing to load and redirect visitors to X.com — we've just noticed the domain name registration looks set to expire this month.
According to what we can see, the registry expiration date for Twitter.com is set for January 21, 2026. If anyone's in the market for a bit of internet history, mark your calendar for 4:28pm on that date and put your bank manager on notice.
It probably won't cost you the $44 billion that Elon paid, but it won't be cheap.
Twitter is back (in the UK)
Ok, and it seems like our little adventure may have come to an end. X.com is back up and running for me based in London, U.K. As you can see from the screenshot above, all my content is loading as normal.
According to my colleagues in other parts of the world, there are still some niggling issues. In New York, posts are loading but very slowly while in a few other parts of the world the posts are loading but the comments aren't.
I'll keep an eye on this for a little longer though, just to make sure we're all out of the woods and can get back to sharing our memes and political opinions with each other.
The recovery continues...
It appears like X.com has righted itself on mobile, but desktop is still seeing a few issues. While posts and comments have seemingly returned to the mobile app for us in New York, we're still seeing the desktop client acting a little funky.
Elsewhere, the DownDetector reports on this outage are falling fast back down to 33k. Safe to say the worst is behind us.
And today's issues didn't even merit a mention on the official X Engineering account. So I guess they're not too worried.
Normal service is resumed
Ok, I think we can safely say the issues with X.com have been resolved at this point. The troubles we saw today lasted roughly an hour.
I took a look at the X developer platform status page for clarification and it's saying all systems are operational. So we'll end the live coverage here — what caused today's blip will likely forever remain a mystery.
What Grok has to say
One of my colleagues asked Grok about today's X outage.
It largely follows the same news that we've been reporting and even cites Tom's Guide in its summary.
Anecdotally, we've found that Grok is working but slowly but some DMs are down.
Reports way down
Reports for X on Down Detector had brief spike about an hour ago but they've been in decline since then hovering around 1200 right now.
It's not quite over and comments on DD have devolved into meme-based insanity. Which usually indicates that things are still going but also that it's not as bad as it once was.
X status page still showing degraded performance
On the whole, this X outage is largely over but the X Developer Platform Status page is still showing some systems are "degraded."
Specifically, it highlights the X API v2. An incident history page says the interruption is ongoing. That page notes that there are increased connection errors for streaming endpoints.
Almost over
I've kept an eye on things and for the most part things haven't changed much. The status page still shows degradation.
However, reports are at 600 now on Down Detector and X seems to be functioning fine.
It is done
Reports on Down Detector have finally dipped under 500 for the first time all day.
When it comes to massive platforms like X that means that the outage is essentially over even if some individuals might still be having issues.
Even the X developer status page has fully gone green
