X outage hits as Grok scrutiny and UK regulation collide
X has been hit by a widespread outage, leaving millions of its users unable to load posts, photos or entire timelines, a tech stumble that has landed at an acute moment for Elon Musk’s platform.
By early afternoon on Tuesday, over 7,000 X users in both the UK and across the pond reported problems to DownDetector, with complaints peaking far earlier in the day in the US.
Most users have described intermittent failures rather than total blackouts, with home feeds stalled, profiles returning error messages, and posts refusing to refresh.
The app was also affected, though some of its features, like trending topics, for example, appeared to load sporadically for a few users
X does not have a public service status page and has not yet commented on the cause of the disruption.
Historically, the platform has suffered a string of major outages since Musk’s takeover.
A prolonged failure in March 2025 triggered over 1.6 million DownDetector reports, while a global Cloudflare blackout in November caused knock-on issues across major sites like X.
Similar incidents linked to Amazon Web Services took large parts of the internet offline last year, from banks to workplace tools.
But this time, the technical failure coincided with mounting political pressure in the UK over Musk’s social media platform’s ability, or willingness, to police itself.
Outage lands amid public sector pressure
The failure comes as the government ponders new legislation that would make it illegal to create non-consensual explicit images, following growing concerns about the misuse of the platform’s internal chatbot, Grok.
Ofcom confirmed on Monday that it has opened an investigation into whether X has done enough to protect users from explicit deepfakes generated using the LLM, warning that alleged breaches “may amount to intimate image abuse or pornography”, and could include sexualised images of children.
If found in breach of the Online Safety Act, X could face fines of up to 10 per cent of global revenue, or £18m, whichever is higher.
A spokesperson from n10 welcomed the investigation, while tech secretary Liz Kendall dubbed it “vital that Ofcom complete this investigation swiftly because the public, and most importantly the victims, will not accept any delay.”
Starmer has also sharpened his tone, warning that X could lose its ability to self-regulate if it fails to get Grok under control.
“If X cannot control Grok, we will”, he told MPs earlier this week.