social media platform ×The service formerly known as Twitter experienced a massive global outage on Friday, January 16th. This latest technical glitch comes just three days after thousands of users were locked out of the site earlier this week.
Immediately after that, reports started pouring in. 4:30pm (Central European Time),over 77,000 users Report the issue on the tracking site Downdetector. Visitors to the platform were greeted with a variety of error messages, including “Your connection timed out,” “Something went wrong,” and “This page is not working.”
While hosting the site, cloudflarereported that the system was operating normally, but users attempting to access X were shown a notification stating that the platform’s own servers were experiencing a critical error.
pattern of confusion
The disruption marks the second time this week that the platform has been stalled. above Tuesday, January 13thover 25,500 users reported similar access issues. Since acquiring the company in late 2022 for $44 billion, X has weathered a series of significant technological stumbles.
- March 2025: The massive outage led to more than 1.6 million reports on Downdetector, which was later determined to be caused by a “massive cyberattack.”
- May 2025: A data center failure disrupted thousands of services in the United States, Canada, and Germany.
- November 2025: A security configuration flaw involving Cloudflare caused the platform’s traffic system to temporarily crash.
Infrastructure and cost savings
Industry analysts frequently point to aggressive cost-cutting measures as a major factor in the decline in platform stability. Following the 2022 acquisition, the company’s engineering staff was reduced from approximately 7,500 to less than 2,000.
In addition to the layoffs, several physical infrastructure changes were made to save an estimated $1 billion.
- Data center closure: The Sacramento data center was abruptly closed and the Atlanta facility was significantly downsized.
- Hardcoded error: After the Sacramento closure, it was revealed that the site’s code contained approximately 70,000 hard-coded references to that specific location, leaving functionality “broken.”
- Cloud spending: Spending on Google Cloud services was drastically reduced, further straining the remaining resources on the platform.
As of 5 p.m. Friday, Company X had not released an official statement regarding the specific cause of today’s power outage. While service appears to be slowly returning to some users, many users continue to report intermittent outages.
