Chandigarh, Jan 16: A massive technical failure disrupted Elon Musk’s social media platform X and its AI chatbot Grok on Friday, cutting off access for tens of thousands of users across the globe. Reports of the outage began to surge around 8:40 pm IST, with users in major Indian cities—including Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru—finding themselves unable to refresh their timelines or post new updates.
The disruption appeared to stem from server-side issues, with many users encountering error messages from Cloudflare indicating that the web server could not be reached. “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault,” the platform’s website displayed during the peak of the crisis. On mobile devices, the app remained static, frequently showing the message: “Cannot retrieve posts at this time. Please try again later.”
The outage was notably widespread, with Downdetector recording over 74,000 incident reports globally, including more than 6,000 from India alone. Users in the United States and the United Kingdom reported even higher volumes of service failures, peaking at roughly 185,000 and 20,000 reports respectively. Grok, the platform’s integrated artificial intelligence, was equally affected, either remaining unresponsive or failing to load its interface entirely.
While services began to gradually stabilize after roughly 90 minutes, X has yet to issue an official statement regarding the root cause of the glitch. This incident marks the second major technical disruption for the platform within the same week, following a similar outage on Tuesday. Industry analysts noted that such frequent lapses raise questions about the current stability of the platform’s infrastructure following recent administrative shifts.
