x goes down after days of chaos with grok

The platform has been mired by controversy for weeks (Picture: AFP)

Tens of thousands of users said they were unable to use X worldwide earlier after the website and app went down.

Coming amid global outrage over Elon Musk’s AI-powered chatbot generating sexualised images of people,the site crashed at about 3pm.

X users in the US,Japan,Australia and Germany,among others,have flagged issues with using the platform.

Were you impacted by the X outage? Email us at: [email protected]

At its peak at 3.15pm in the UK alone,more than 20,000 people in the UK were affected,according to internet disruptor tracker Downdetector.

It has since seemingly recovered,although some users might still find it a bit glitchy.

Is X down?

Outage reports dipped to 6,700 at 3,30pm before doubling to 12,800 less than 20 minutes later.

Of the problems reported,59% relate to problems with the app,33% with the website and 7% with X’s timeline.

As of 4.05pm,the number of people impacted has dropped to less than 2,000.

The blackout began at about 3pm (Picture: DownDetector)

When trying to load the X,users are met with a screen reading: ‘Something went wrong. Try reloading.’

The reload button then resulted in a spinning circle.

The website may also load but will show no posts – some users are claiming it has come back in the last hour before breaking again.

While X may load for some,posts will not (Picture: X)

Hundreds are also reporting issues accessing Grok via X. However,the tool’s standalone website,Grok Imagine,appears to be unaffected.

The cause of the blackout is unclear as X,unlike many tech platforms,does not have a public status page to give updates on outages.

Its developer platform – a tool belt for app-makers – reports that ‘all systems are operational’.

Some users are getting Cloudflare error screens when loading X,saying that there is a ‘host error’.

The software company Cloudflare helps websites secure and manage their internet traffic,so they don’t buckle under demand.

X was one of many websites disrupted when Cloudflare went down in November and December.

The blackout included Grok (Picture: Getty Images)

Tens of thousands of users reported error messages like ‘Error code 500’ and ‘Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed’.

Cloudflare said the cause was a file that set off ‘a crash in the software system’ that handles web traffic.

No issues have been reported on the Cloudflare health status website,other than ‘scheduled maintenance’ happening at its St Louis centre.

X,however,had been hit by multiple small outages in March 2025,impacting about 10,800 people in the UK.

X has been approached for comment.