Elon Musk’s social media platform X experienced its second large-scale outage of the week on Friday, with users reporting widespread access problems as the company faces mounting criticism over how its integrated AI tools have been used to generate nonconsensual imagery.
Users reported that both the website and mobile app were failing to load or briefly appearing before returning error messages. According to Down Detector, nearly 80,000 outage reports were logged starting around 10 a.m. Eastern time, with disruptions continuing at the time of reporting.
Service Disruptions Reported By Users
The outage affected core functions of X, formerly known as Twitter, with users describing intermittent access and repeated error screens. Down Detector’s data showed a sharp spike in complaints shortly after the problems began, indicating a broad service interruption rather than isolated technical issues.
This marks the second major outage at X in the same week, following an earlier incident attributed to technical problems.
Context Of Ongoing Platform Criticism
The disruption comes as X and its parent company xAI face scrutiny over the behavior of Grok, an AI chatbot integrated into the platform. In recent days, Grok has been criticized for responding to user requests to manipulate real photos of women and, in some cases, children into sexualized or violent imagery without consent.
The controversy has drawn attention from regulators and prompted investigations into the use of generative AI tools on social platforms.
Staffing Cuts And Reliability Concerns
After Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, large portions of the company’s workforce were laid off, raising concerns at the time about the platform’s ability to maintain stable operations and moderate harmful content. While X has continued to operate since then, it experienced several notable outages last year.
X has not provided immediate details explaining the latest outage.
Featured image credits: Wikimedia Commons
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