X, formerly Twitter, experienced a widespread outage on January 16, 2026, preventing tens of thousands of users globally from accessing its mobile app and website. The platform's crash occurred amidst significant controversy surrounding Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, which has been accused of generating sexualized images of individuals. Reports of the outage began around 2:30 PM, with Downdetector indicating over 20,000 affected users in the UK alone by 3:15 PM. Users encountered error messages such as "Something went wrong. Try reloading," and some reported that the site would intermittently load but without displaying any posts.
The disruption also affected access to Grok through X, although Grok's standalone website, Grok Imagine, remained operational. Issues with the X platform were reported by users in the United States, Japan, Australia, and Germany. The exact cause of the blackout remains unconfirmed, as X does not maintain a public status page for outages. While X's developer platform indicated all systems were operational, some users reported seeing Cloudflare error screens, suggesting a potential "host error" related to the internet traffic management service that X utilizes. This is not the first time X has been impacted by Cloudflare outages, as the service experienced disruptions last year.