X outage: Elon Musk-owned platform sees long global disruption, messaging features hit

Social media platform X, owned by Elon Musk, experienced a widespread outage in the early hours of Friday, 23 May, affecting users across several countries. The disruption, which began around 1 A.M. IST, left many users unable to access the app or navigate the website. Reports of issues surged on DownDetector, with complaints continuing well into Friday afternoon.

Although services have largely stabilised in India, users in countries such as the United States, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Peru, Malaysia, and Germany continue to face difficulties. Data from DownDetector suggests a renewed spike in outage reports beginning around 12 P.M. IST.

According to a report by the Indian Express, a statement on X’s developer platform acknowledged ongoing issues, describing them as “degraded performance” and confirming a “site-wide outage” still under investigation. “X is aware some of our users are experiencing performance issues on the platform today. We are experiencing a data centre outage and the team is actively working to remediate the issue,” the company’s engineering team posted.

For many users, the disruption has impacted direct messaging features. While some can still view their inboxes, others are seeing blank screens or error messages such as “Cannot retrieve messages. Please try again later.” A number of users in India reported being unable to log in at all, instead encountering the prompt: “Something isn’t right. Please try again later.”

The outage, now stretching into its twelfth hour, has sparked frustration among X users. While some voiced concern over the company’s lack of timely customer support, others took to the platform, if they could access it to share memes and humour in an attempt to lighten the mood

This marks the second major outage for the platform in 2025. In March, X went offline for about 30 minutes, locking thousands of users out. A longer global outage was recorded in September 2024, when the platform was inaccessible for over an hour.