X Goes Down: Musk’s Social Network Malfunctions for Thousands of Users

X, formerly known as Twitter, briefly experienced serious malfunctions for thousands of users Friday.

Many users accessing X suddenly saw their entire feeds disappear, and the ability to post messages stopped working. On the home screen, this message appeared for logged-in users, as if they had just signed up: “Welcome to X! This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now.” In addition, users’ own posts were also inaccessible.

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As of 4:21 p.m. ET, more than 34,000 users had logged error complaints about accessing the social network with Downdetector, an uptime-monitoring site. Reports of problems with X began spiking at around 4 p.m. ET, according to Downdetector.

On the X Developer Platform status page, a message update said there was a “Site-wide outage” as of Friday at 4:20 p.m. ET. “Some X API endpoints are currently experiencing degraded performance,” the site said. “You may experience 503 errors for the following endpoints: Get User Timeline / Get Tweets / Get DM / Create Tweet.”

X’s technical problems appeared to be resolved in less than an hour, with services seemingly restored to normal. Error complaints on Downdetector dropped to about 4,500 as of 4:37 p.m. ET.

The outage occurred as Elon Musk, the tech mogul who owns X, visited the White House on Friday, where President Trump held a press conference in the Oval Office thanking Musk for his service to the administration in leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk on Thursday announced that he is stepping away from the administration, although he will continue to informally advise Trump, he said.

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