Elon Musk’s X restores service after global outage hits thousands

Elon Musk's X was restored for thousands of users in the United States following an hour-long outage on Thursday (August 14), according to monitoring website Downdetector.com. The outage slowed to almost 600 reports of users experiencing issues with the social media platform as of 11:20am ET, down from a high of over 18,000 user reports, said Downdetector.

Downdetector monitors outages by aggregating status reports from various sources. Because the figures are based on user-reported instances, the true number of impacted users can be different. X has not yet replied to a request for comment.

Earlier, as per Downdetector statistics, the outage began to go viral around 8:25 PM IST when reports spiked from mere dozens to thousands in mere minutes. In India, users complained of not being able to load timelines, post updates, or even log in to their accounts. On a global scale, it seemed even worse — Downdetector's US outage page clocked more than 16,000 reports at its peak about 8:26 PM local time.

The blackout impacted various regions, with complaints flooding in from North America, Europe, Asia, and portions of the Middle East. Heat maps indicated dense trouble areas in large metropolitan cities, suggesting mass connectivity problems instead of discrete outages.

The majority of the reported problem was related to the site, at 58% of complaints in one case, with 35% of the problems being with the app and approximately 6% with server connections. Internationally, problem split was different, with the site and app nearly evenly impacted — 52% and 47% correspondingly, and 1% of reporting server connection problems.

Users flocked to other social media sites to express their frustration, claiming they could not refresh feeds, send direct messages, or access notifications. Others claimed to be automatically logged out and unable to log back in, with others seeing error messages when attempting to access the site.