Elon Musk’s social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), experienced yet another service disruption on Friday afternoon, affecting users across the globe.
According to Downdetector, a website that monitors outages based on user reports, over 15,000 individuals encountered issues by 4 p.m. Eastern Time, with some estimates rising to more than 16,000 complaints within minutes. This marks the third major outage the platform has faced in just over a week, intensifying concerns about its reliability.
During the outage, users reported a wide array of problems. Many found their timelines completely empty, with the algorithm-driven “For You” feed failing to load any posts. Others experienced issues such as images not appearing, the XMoney banking service being inaccessible, posts failing to publish, and search functions returning no results. Some features were reported to work intermittently or only on the mobile app, while desktop users faced more persistent difficulties.
The disruption began shortly before 4 p.m. ET and appeared to be easing by early evening, although the X Developer API version 2 still showed degraded performance at the time of reporting. The platform’s engineering team has not publicly disclosed the specific cause of the outage, continuing a pattern of limited communication since Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company in 2022.
This outage coincided with the rollout of X’s new direct messaging feature, XChat, which entered beta testing after a pause on encrypted messages to implement upgrades. It remains unclear whether these recent changes contributed to the technical instability.
This incident follows a series of outages that have plagued the platform throughout 2025. Earlier this month, a major data centre failure caused widespread login and posting issues, affecting tens of thousands of users worldwide.
In March, Musk attributed a previous outage to a “massive cyberattack,” highlighting ongoing security and infrastructure challenges. Users and industry observers have expressed frustration over the frequency and duration of these disruptions, which have impacted core functions such as logging in, refreshing feeds, and accessing notifications.
The timing of Friday’s outage was notable, occurring just hours after a controversial New York Times report on Musk’s personal conduct and coinciding with the end of his role as an unofficial presidential advisor. While some speculated about a connection, there is no confirmed link between these events and the technical problems.