X Returns to Service After Widespread Disruption
X (formerly Twitter) experienced a significant global outage on January 16, 2026, affecting millions of users worldwide throughout the morning before services were restored by early afternoon.
The outage began around 3:12 PM UTC, with StatusGator’s early warning systems detecting the first wave of user reports indicating that both X and its AI chatbot Grok were failing to load. The disruption escalated rapidly, with outage reports peaking at nearly 185,000 in the United States alone, and 129,406 reports from Japan.
What Users Experienced
During the disruption, both the website and mobile application became unresponsive, with users encountering blank screens and technical errors such as “503 Service Unavailable” and “522 Connection Timed Out”. Many users experienced a “zombie” state where the user interface would load, but timelines remained empty with no new posts, comments, or images appearing.
The outage affected major cities including Tokyo, New York City, Osaka, Chicago, and Yokohama.
Recovery and Root Cause
The service began returning to normal around 8:55 PM UTC, with most users able to access X by approximately 11:45 AM ET. While some users initially feared the outage was related to Cloudflare infrastructure issues, Cloudflare’s cofounder Matthew Prince refuted these claims.
Transparency Concerns
A notable issue during the incident was the lack of timely communication from X. Despite widespread disruptions affecting hundreds of thousands of users, X’s developer status page remained marked as “All Systems Operational” well into the outage, leaving many users uncertain whether the problem existed on their end.