X was down – here's what happened in the latest outage

It's not another cellular outage, but X (formerly Twitter) appears to be having some issues for many users right now. When I try to load the main homepage, I'm seeing the timeline and trending bars on the side fail to load, displaying 'Something went wrong' text.

Spikes in reported outages on Down Detector are starting to rise as of 10:15AM ET, reaching over 70,000 in the United States. At the same time, reports for Grok began spiking, reaching around 2,200. As of

To track what's going on with X, TechRadar is spinning up a liveblog to monitor the social platform – here's all the latest news.

2026-01-16T16:22:44.707Z

Down Detector reports are steadily dropping as well, currently sitting at under 8,000 reports as of 11:02 AM ET. Let us know in the comments down below if you're able to access X again and see more recent posts.

2026-01-16T16:19:20.541Z

Considering many of the posts appearing in our timelines are from over an hour ago, or in some cases longer, it does appear that X is playing catch-up and is in recovery mode.

2026-01-16T16:11:46.930Z

On desktop here in the United States, X appears back for me, with the timeline loading and trending topics on the side, showing fairly recent posts. The first post is less than an hour old, but it's a bit slow to access different aspects of the site.

I've heard from colleagues in the US and the UK that it's a bit slow, but it is loading and getting closer to normal usage levels.

2026-01-16T16:02:32.558Z

On mobile – specifically the X app for iOS – in the UK, my colleague, TechRadar's Mark Wilson, is seeing a timeline with 'Posts aren't loading right now' at the top with a selection of older posts appearing underneath.

In the US, I'm not seeing the error up top, but the timeline below is not updated with recent posts; all are dated several hours ago.

2026-01-16T16:00:12.870Z

Down Detector reports show a slight recovery, and then a spike of outages

Down Detector reports show it's likely the case for many: X went down, causing the initial spike, slightly recovered, and then hit problems again. As of the last update at 10:42 AM ET, there are over 53,000 reports of issues with using X.

Interestingly, my colleague Lance Ulanoff was able to post, but it took a while to appear on his profile.

2026-01-16T15:35:40.141Z

While X was down for me initially, it came back, and then went away again. And it seems that's the case as of now for many of my TechRadar colleagues in both the US and the UK – they still can't get X to load as a whole, with the timeline not loading, and trending terms on the side.