The social media platform X, formerly Twitter, experienced an intermittent outage starting around 7 a.m. PT on January 16, 2026, affecting users worldwide and its AI chatbot Grok. Reports spiked on Downdetector, with issues lingering for several hours before full resolution by early afternoon.
X's outage began at 7:39 a.m. PT, according to its developer platform, which reported an ongoing incident related to streaming endpoints causing increased errors. The disruption was intermittent: at times, the website loaded partially and displayed only older posts, while at others, the app and site failed to load entirely. By 9:30 a.m. PT, the Explore and trending pages were accessible, but the "following" tab showed no posts and prompted users to "find some people and topic to follow."
Downdetector recorded a spike in reports starting just before 7 a.m. PT, peaking at over 50,000 users. The platform's AI chatbot Grok also saw a surge in outage complaints, though smaller in scale. Affected areas included major cities like Tokyo, New York City, Osaka, Chicago, and Yokohama, with the highest report volumes from the US (over 184,000), Japan (129,000), and the UK (42,000). The peak reporting window was from 15:13 to 15:24 UTC, equivalent to 7:13-7:24 a.m. PT.
Small increases in outage reports were noted for internet services like Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services. This marked the second significant disruption for X that week, following a global downtime on Tuesday. The outage occurred amid scrutiny over nonconsensual sexualized images generated by Grok and shared on the platform.
By 11:15 a.m. PT, X's developer site still indicated ongoing issues, but the main website appeared to function normally, and Downdetector reports had dropped. At 1 p.m. PT, X updated its status page to confirm resolution after nearly six hours, without detailing the cause. X did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
