One of the world’s most widely used social media platforms, X, formerly known as Twitter, appeared to experience a service disruption on Monday afternoon, leaving thousands of users unable to access content.
Although users were still able to open the website and mobile application, timelines, profiles and feeds failed to load properly, suggesting a partial outage rather than a complete shutdown. Complaints quickly surfaced online as users reported intermittent access issues.
Data from outage-tracking platform DownDetector showed that as of 2:00 p.m. on January 13, more than 7,000 users had flagged problems with the service. The majority of reports cited difficulties loading the homepage, while others described inconsistent performance across the platform.
The mobile app was also affected, with users in both the United Kingdom and the United States reporting similar problems. It remains unclear whether the disruption extended to other regions.
X has experienced significant technical failures in the past. In March 2025, a major outage generated over 1.6 million reports on DownDetector. Earlier, in November, Cloudflare-related issues caused widespread disruptions across multiple major platforms, including X, Spotify and ChatGPT.
The timing of the outage coincides with heightened regulatory scrutiny in the UK, where new legislation is being prepared to criminalise the creation of non-consensual intimate images. The move follows growing concerns surrounding Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot and its potential misuse.
Addressing Labour MPs on Monday, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer warned that X could lose its ability to self-regulate if the issue is not adequately addressed. He stated that government intervention would follow if the platform failed to take control of the situation.
