X suffers second major outage this week

The social media platform X is currently experiencing its second large-scale outage this week, leaving users unable to access the service normally. Down Detector, a third-party service that tracks website outages, recorded nearly 80,000 reports of the service being down. The technical issues began at around 10 a.m. Eastern time, with users reporting that the site and app are either not loading at all or are glitching briefly before displaying error messages.

This latest technical failure follows an earlier technical issue this week, compounding operational challenges for the platform formerly known as Twitter. The instability arrives at a highly sensitive moment for X and its owner, Elon Musk. The platform is currently facing intense criticism regarding its integrated AI chatbot, Grok, which was developed by artificial intelligence company xAI. The tool has been fulfilling user requests to manipulate real photos of women, and even children, into nonconsensual sexual and violent imagery. This safety issue has intensified scrutiny on X’s content moderation standards.

The combination of technical instability and safety concerns has renewed long-standing questions about the platform’s operational capacity. When Musk took over Twitter in 2022, he laid off much of the staff, which immediately sparked worries among observers that the site would not be able to function normally or adequately monitor for harmful content. While X has largely remained running since the 2022 layoffs, it has experienced notable outages, and this week’s back-to-back failures have brought those operational concerns back to the forefront. TechCrunch has reached out to X for comment regarding the ongoing outage.

Why it matters

The outage marks the second major technical failure for X this week, occurring amid ongoing criticism regarding the platform’s content moderation capabilities and the safety of its integrated AI chatbot, Grok.