X goes down globally as thousands of users report widespread outages

X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk and rebranded from Twitter, went down for thousands of users globally, with outage tracking site Downdetector recording a steep surge in error reports from multiple countries simultaneously.

Users attempting to load timelines, post content or access direct messages were met with error screens or unresponsive pages. The outage appeared to affect both the web version and mobile apps. X did not immediately issue a public statement explaining the disruption, which lasted for a period before service began to be gradually restored for many users.

Outages on X tend to attract outsized attention because the platform functions as real-time public infrastructure — it is where governments post emergency alerts, journalists break stories, and markets sometimes move on announcements. In India specifically, X is heavily used for political commentary, business news and public discourse, making any significant downtime immediately felt.

The incident reignites ongoing questions about the stability of X's platform following significant workforce reductions in its engineering and trust-and-safety teams since Musk's acquisition of the company in 2022. Critics have argued that deep staff cuts have made the platform more vulnerable to technical failures.

For ordinary users, the outage was a reminder of how dependent daily information consumption has become on a handful of private platforms — and what happens when even one of them blinks.