In what should have been just another morning on the internet, tens of thousands of users woke up to error messages and spinning loading screens. Elon Musk's social media platform X—formerly known as Twitter—had simply stopped working. From London to Los Angeles, from New Delhi to Jakarta, the service that has become central to how millions communicate, share news, and conduct business simply disappeared.
By 10:22 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday, 16 January, Downdetector.com was flooded with more than 62,000 reports of problems in the United States alone. The UK saw approximately 11,000 incidents reported, whilst India logged over 3,000 issues. Global outage tracking websites lit up red as users encountered the now-familiar frustration of trying to refresh their feed and finding nothing but the message 'Something went wrong. Try reloading'.
