X was down for thousands — live updates on outage

What's happened so far?

Problems at Twitter seem to have started about 25 minutes ago, with Down Detector recording a spike of user reports at 9.52 a.m. Eastern Time (6.52 PT / 2.52 p.m. BST). reports indicate the majority of problems are coming from both the X app and its website, though a handful are reporting issues with the server connection.

Right now it's unclear what has caused this problem, but with over 11,000 reported issues at the time of writing this is probably something fairly big.

How widespread is this problem?

Outages are no small thing, especially when they spike into the tens of thousands in a matter of minutes. But it's still unclear just how widespread the X outage actually is right now. A number of us here at Tom's Guide are able to access the social network without issues, but others have reported problems.

I did notice that the site was loading rather slowly at first, but otherwise seems to be working without issue. I was even able to log out and back in again without any actual problems.

Which areas reported the most issues?

According to Down Detector's outage map, the problems seem to be mainly located in the major cities along the eastern time zone — which is no huge surprise.

The big cities are where all the people are, and it's still early enough that a good percentage of the west coast may still be asleep. Or, at the very least, too busy getting ready to doomscroll on X.

It's not just the US

Over in the U.K., X seems to be having some similar problems. A huge spike in issues were reported at 2.52 p.m. local time, with the coverage map focussing on most of the big cities. Most notably London, but also major population hubs like Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham.

Like the U.S., it seems that people seem to be having issues with both the app and the website.

Reports are already dropping quite fast

Curiously the number of reports on Down Detector is dropping pretty rapidly. At the time of writing the number of reported issues has dropped to triple figures, and a large number of the Tom's Guide staff seem to be able to access X without issue.

But considering the huge spike in problems within the past hour, we'll be keeping a close eye on both X and Down Detector just in case things take a turn for the worse.

Are things back to normal?

Almost an hour after the problems at X were first reported, it seem Down Detector has sunk back down to semi-usual levels. Despite peaking at 13,605 reports at 10 a.m. ET, the outage graph has dropped down to 267 reports at the time of writing.

The Tom's Guide staff who had issues with X earlier in the afternoon are now reporting that things are back up and running. So my question is, what actually caused this to happen?

There's been no word from the official X or Safety accounts, though the official Grok AI account notes that problems have been reported — lasting around 46 minutes.

So... What happened?

Until we get some sort of statement from X itself, the cause of today's outage will probably remain a mystery.

One of my colleagues has speculated that it may have something to do with the social network adding AI to its Community Notes feature. Considering new features can cause unexplained glitches to pop up, this is a good an explanation as any. But it could just as easily have been something completely different — like a server bank having a bad day.

But with reported issues now as low as 125 on Down Detector, it seems whatever caused the problem has now been fixed.