X Platform Experiences Third Major Service Disruption of the Year
Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has been hit by a widespread and significant outage, with thousands of users across the United Kingdom and the United States reporting severe difficulties accessing both the website and mobile applications. This service disruption represents the third major technical incident affecting the platform in recent months, highlighting ongoing operational challenges for the Elon Musk-owned company.
Widespread User Reports and Technical Failures
According to comprehensive data from the outage tracking service Downdetector, reports of problems began rising sharply at approximately 1:05 PM on Monday. Shortly after 1:00 PM, over 3,000 users in the United Kingdom had flagged significant issues with the platform, while at the height of the disruption, more than 40,000 reports were registered from users in the United States. The majority of these reports indicated complete inability to access core platform functions.
Over half of the initial United Kingdom reports specifically concerned the platform's mobile application, with users experiencing various technical failures. Approximately twenty percent of affected users reported being completely unable to access their main feed, while sixteen percent encountered other significant issues throughout the site. Users attempting to load the platform were met with blank screens, posts that failed to refresh properly, and various error messages instead of their expected content.
Historical Context of Recent Platform Outages
This latest service disruption marks the third significant outage affecting the platform in recent months, continuing a pattern of technical instability. In January of this year, thousands of users reported intermittent issues with timelines and profiles failing to load properly. Previously, in November, a widespread Cloudflare outage knocked substantial portions of the internet offline, affecting X alongside other major services including ChatGPT and Canva.
In other documented instances, similar outages have been directly linked to infrastructure problems at major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services. Elon Musk, who purchased the company in 2022 and rebranded it from Twitter to X, has previously acknowledged the pressing need for what he termed "major operational improvements" following earlier disruptions. A particularly large-scale outage in March 2025 triggered more than 1.6 million reports globally, while Musk attributed a separate incident to what he described as a "major cyberattack."
Regulatory Scrutiny and Compliance Challenges
Monday's widespread outage occurs as United Kingdom regulator Ofcom begins scrutinizing the platform's compliance with the recently implemented Online Safety Act. Ofcom has recently opened a formal investigation into whether X has implemented sufficient measures to prevent the spread of illegal and harmful content across its platform. This investigation specifically includes examination of explicit AI-generated images produced by the platform's in-house chatbot, Grok.
Under the provisions of the Online Safety Act, companies found in serious breach of these regulations can face substantial financial penalties, including fines of up to £18 million or ten percent of their global annual turnover. As of Monday afternoon, X had not yet issued any public statement regarding the specific cause of the latest outage. It remains unclear whether Monday's disruption was linked to internal technical issues or problems with external infrastructure providers.
