Elon Musk’s X experienced a widespread global outage on Monday, affecting millions of users, including those in India. The disruption, which lasted approximately 30 to 40 minutes, prevented users from accessing the platform via both the app and website. According to outage-tracking service Down Detector, the issue peaked around 3 PM, with users in major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Patna, Kolkata, and Hyderabad reporting difficulties in loading profiles, tweets, and other content.
Since Musk acquired X (formerly Twitter) in October 2022 and drastically reduced its workforce by about 80%, the platform has generally remained stable. While X has faced occasional glitches and technical issues, complete outages of this scale have been rare.
However, the latest issue was the largest one since Musk’s takeover. It’s unclear what caused the outage, but some speculate that it could be related to a recent security update, which could have broken some features. Others suggest it might be a sign of a more significant issue with the site, which bots and other problems have plagued.
In August, a live stream interview between Musk and President Trump was delayed by 40 minutes due to technical difficulties with the X app. That interview—and other events that have used the X app to stream—have drawn criticism from critics of the platform for its poor performance, which they claim is evidence that it is susceptible to hacking and other issues.
Despite these challenges, the X app is still prevalent in many parts of the world, especially in Brazil, where it was recently blocked by the country’s Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is feuding with Musk over free speech and far-right accounts on the site. De Moraes said that X hadn’t provided the legal justification required to operate in Brazil and failed to respond to demands for transparency.
The blockade of X was widely condemned in Brazil, where the company has millions of users. Thousands of them took to social media to complain about the outage, with some tweeting that they could not use the site.
In a blog post, X announced it was working to improve its “product reliability and stability,” adding that a peer-to-peer payments feature is coming this year. It also promised to work to “increase the utility of X for all users” through search, ads, and a new “See Dissimilar Posts” feature that will help find content on the site more easily. In addition, X has reinstated the accounts of several suspended journalists and other commentators. They include the Texas Observer’s Steven Monacelli, The Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein, and MintPress News’ Alan MacLeod. Those accounts were reinstated shortly after the outage. X is one of the few major social media platforms that requires people to pay to create and read posts on its site. Its competition includes Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Several other major sites have free accounts, but they restrict how much material they allow to be posted.
