Global outage hits Elon Musk’s X; Engineering team cites data center issue

X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, faced a widespread outage beginning around 1 A.M. IST on Friday, May 23, affecting users across several countries. According to Downdetector, users from the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Malaysia, and Peru reported being unable to use the app or navigate the website.

While services now appear to be functioning normally in India, reports of errors persist globally. Some users are still encountering blank DM inboxes or login errors stating, “Something isn’t right. Please try again later.”

On X’s developer status page, the company acknowledged “degraded performance” across some systems and confirmed a “site-wide outage” still underway. Although there’s no official status page for the main platform, the engineering team posted on X that the disruption is due to a “data center outage” and that engineers are actively working on a fix, with no timeline provided.

This marks the second major outage for X in 2025, following a 30-minute disruption in March. A longer outage also occurred in September 2024.

Despite some functionality returning, user frustration remains high, with many taking to the platform to express concerns and share memes about the service issues.

A few weeks back, the escalating standoff between X and the Indian government took another turn when the platform’s own @GlobalAffairs account was withheld in India. This action, which comes in the wake of X’s disclosure about receiving executive orders to block over 8,000 accounts — including those of international media and prominent users — highlights the increasingly complex dynamics between global tech platforms and national regulations.

While X has complied to avoid “significant fines and imprisonment” for its local staff, the platform has also openly criticized the secrecy surrounding these directives. In a statement, it warned that the inability to publish the orders erodes public trust: “Lack of disclosure discourages accountability and can contribute to arbitrary decision making.”