Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) experienced a two-hour global outage today (February 16). Thousands of users reported being unable to access their feeds and seeing blank screens. However, it continued to turn on and off for brief periods. More than 45,000 people reported outages between 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm on the outage tracking website, Downdetector. Although service has since been restored, users said they were unable to view their timelines or post new posts. This is the second time in a month that X’s service has been disrupted. Earlier on January 16th, thousands of users in several countries, including India, the US, the UK, and Canada, faced problems accessing the service. 49% of users were unable to access the website According to DownDetector, 49% of X users worldwide were unable to access the website. 41% were having trouble using the app, and nearly 10% reported problems loading the timeline. What exactly happened? According to users, both the app and website stopped working properly. The homepage failed to load, feeds wouldn’t refresh, and profiles appeared completely blank. Timelines were missing, and notifications were either delayed or not visible at all. DownDetector showed a sharp spike in outage reports at the same time, suggesting the issue was widespread and likely linked to a server-side problem. Feed updates hit the hardest Interestingly, about 38% of users specifically reported issues with feed updates. This means a large number of people were unable to see new posts or updates in real time. For a platform built around instant conversations and trending topics, such disruptions can seriously affect user engagement. Many frustrated users even turned to other social media platforms to talk about the issue, since posting or interacting on X itself became difficult. There is no official statement from X yet. Elon Musk or X’s support team have not yet provided any official information regarding the cause of this outage or its recovery time. X typically issues patch updates internally in such cases, after which service is gradually restored. These frequent technical incidents have raised questions about the stability of the platform. 4 outages of X
