On Monday, February 16, 2026—Presidents' Day in the United States—millions of users around the globe awoke to find themselves locked out of one of the world’s most influential social media platforms. X, the site formerly known as Twitter and now under the stewardship of Elon Musk, suffered a sweeping outage that left both its mobile app and website inaccessible for a significant portion of the morning. The incident sent shockwaves through digital communities, newsrooms, and businesses that rely on the platform for real-time updates and engagement.
According to Downdetector, an online service that tracks internet outages through user reports, problems began at 8:08 a.m. Eastern Time. In just 30 minutes, the number of user-submitted complaints swelled to nearly 43,000, with many more trickling in as the hour progressed. By 9 a.m., the tally had surpassed 40,000, and at the peak, over 53% of users were struggling with the app, 21% could not access their feeds, and the rest reported website accessibility issues. The outage did not discriminate by geography—users in the United States, United Kingdom, and India all reported being affected, with particularly high concentrations of trouble in major U.S. cities like New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Dallas-Fort Worth (as reported by USA TODAY and Asbury Park Press).
For those attempting to log on, the experience was both confusing and frustrating. Instead of the usual cascade of trending topics and viral posts, users were greeted with a stark screen displaying only the company’s “X” logo. Error messages popped up, including, “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault,” and the more succinct, “Something went wrong. Try reloading.” These cryptic notes offered little solace to those who rely on X for news, networking, or simply a daily dose of internet culture.
Despite the scale of the disruption, information from X itself was conspicuously absent. The company does not maintain a public status page for reporting outages, and, ironically, its official accounts—where such updates are typically posted—were also inaccessible during the blackout. As The Independent pointed out, “The company is yet to confirm what might have caused it or when it will be back online.” This lack of transparency left users in the dark, forced to speculate or seek updates from third-party monitoring sites and news outlets.
For X, this was not an isolated incident. In fact, Monday’s outage marked the fifth such event since November 2025, and the third in just the first two months of 2026. January alone saw two significant disruptions: on January 13, more than 24,000 users were affected, and on January 16, the number soared to 74,000. The January outages coincided with a massive Verizon service disruption that left over 1.5 million customers across the U.S. unable to make calls or send messages, which in turn impacted a host of online platforms, including X. The pattern is hard to ignore: X’s reliability has become a recurring concern for its vast user base, which numbers up to 650 million monthly active users and more than 132 million daily users worldwide (Asbury Park Press).
Technical hiccups of this scale inevitably raise questions about the underlying causes. While X did not immediately provide an explanation for Monday’s event, past outages have had a variety of sources. In November 2025, X and a slew of other major websites—including LinkedIn, Fortnite, and DoorDash—were brought down by a widespread issue at Cloudflare, a major cloud and network service provider. As reported by Asbury Park Press, Cloudflare stated at the time, “We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic. We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.” The December 2025 Cloudflare outage, meanwhile, resulted from an intentional system change that unintentionally triggered disruptions across the internet. Importantly, Cloudflare clarified that neither incident was the result of a cyberattack.
That’s not to say that cyberattacks haven’t been a concern. In March 2025, rolling outages on X were attributed by Elon Musk to “a massive cyberattack” against the platform. Musk, who acquired X in October 2022, has made a habit of communicating about technical issues directly on the platform itself—a strategy that works well, except when the platform is down. This cycle of outages and opaque communication has left users and observers increasingly frustrated.
Adding to the intrigue, January 2026 also saw Musk announce ambitious plans to increase transparency around X’s operations. He promised to publish the algorithmic code that determines what posts and ads are recommended to users, stating, “We will make the new X algorithm, including all code used to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users, open source in 7 days. This will be repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed.” While this move was welcomed by some as a step toward greater openness, it’s unclear whether it will have any impact on the platform’s ongoing reliability woes.
Despite the chaos, there was a silver lining: within about an hour of the initial spike in complaints, service on X had been restored for many users. By 10 a.m. Eastern, tweets and posts were once again loading, and the digital world began to settle back into its familiar rhythm. As USA TODAY noted, “By 10 a.m., tweets were loading on the social media site.” The outage, while disruptive, was relatively brief compared to some previous incidents—such as the three-hour blackout in November 2025.
Still, the frequency of these outages has left many wondering about the platform’s future. For businesses, journalists, activists, and ordinary users alike, X remains a crucial tool for communication and information sharing. But as technical issues mount and official explanations remain scarce, trust in the platform’s reliability is being tested.
Looking back, it’s clear that X’s journey since its rebranding has been anything but smooth. From cyberattacks and network provider failures to ambitious promises of transparency and open-source algorithms, the platform has faced a gauntlet of technical and reputational challenges. Whether these growing pains will lead to a more robust and resilient X—or continued uncertainty for its hundreds of millions of users—remains to be seen. For now, the world is watching, refreshing its feeds, and hoping that the next outage is further off on the horizon.