As of January 17, 2026, X (formerly Twitter) is largely back online following a significant global outage that occurred on Friday, January 16,2026.

X, platform formerly known as Twitter, was down for thousands across the US on Friday. Downdetector, a platform that tracks online outages, showed at least 45,000 reports about X at the time of writing this story. Users were not able to see their timeline and other posts. xAI's bot, Grok, was also down.

Outage Details (January 16, 2026)

Scale: Tens of thousands of users worldwide reported disruptions, with peak reports reaching over 75,000 on Downdetector around 10:00 AM ET (3:00 PM GMT).

Symptoms: Users encountered blank screens, "connection timed out" errors, and timelines that failed to load posts.

Affected Regions: Issues were widespread across the US, UK, India, Canada, Australia, and Europe.

Scope: Both the mobile app and the desktop website were affected, though a majority of reports (56%) cited issues with the mobile application.

Frequency: This was the second major outage in one week; a smaller disruption occurred on Tuesday, January 13, 2026, affecting roughly 24,000 users.

Current Status and Resolution

Restoration: Services began stabilizing by early afternoon ET on January 16. Reports dropped significantly by 2:00 PM ET.

Official Response: X has not yet provided a definitive cause for this specific outage. While some users saw Cloudflare error messages, Cloudflare confirmed their own systems were functioning normally and the issue originated within X's infrastructure.

Troubleshooting Steps

If you are still experiencing issues:

Check Status: Use the Downdetector X (Twitter) Status Page for real-time user reports.

Clear Cache: Try clearing your browser cache or restarting the mobile app.

Check Connection: Switch between Wi-Fi and mobile data to rule out local network problems.