Elon Musk's X, Formerly Twitter, Goes Down in Major Outage
- X experienced a major global outage on Friday, January 16, affecting users' access to feeds and posts worldwide
- Downdetector reported over 45,000 outage reports, with significant complaints from Africa's most populous nation, Nigeria
- Legit.ng reports that many users faced blank screens and error messages at the peak outage time of 3 pm
Legit.ng journalist Ridwan Adeola Yusuf has over 9 years of experience covering world news and global affairs.
Texas, USA - X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, experienced a major global outage on Friday, January 16, 2026.
As reported by The Economic Times, the situation left thousands of users unable to access the Elon Musk-owned social media service.
Source: Facebook
X, formerly Twitter, offline amid outage
Diario AS also noted the development.
Instead of their usual feeds, visitors to both the website and mobile applications were met with blank screens and error messages.
Downdetector, a platform that monitors online outages, recorded over 45,000 reports from Nigeria and around the world regarding X during the disruption.
Users were not able to see their timeline and other posts. Reports of problems surged around 3 pm, according to the tracking website, which showed a huge spike in user complaints. The outage appeared more severe than previous disruptions, where the site would load but display no posts.
X suffers repeated global disruptions
The latest incident comes just days after the platform suffered a global outage on January 13, 2026, which left users worldwide unable to access the service.
X had also experienced a similar global disruption on November 18, 2025, raising concerns among users about the platform’s stability.
The latest outage comes just days after the social media platform implemented changes to its AI tool Grok to prevent users from unclothing pictures of real people.
The move followed widespread criticism of the tool for sharing non-consensual sexual images through image editing.
Source: Twitter
X restores service after brief outage
Meanwhile, X restored its service after users in Nigeria and elsewhere experienced a brief downtime.
X's outage is not the only interruption we have seen happen this week. On Wednesday, January 14, 2026, phone network Verizon tanked for hours on end, leaving customers staring at the SOS screen on their phones. In response, Verizon promised a $20 credit to everyone affected in order to make amends.
Read more on X:
- Elon Musk puts his "X" on Twitter
- Elon Musk's X raises monthly subscription prices
- Elon Musk Merges Twitter With New Company, X Corp to advance his long-held ambition
Twitter reportedly abandons African staff
Legit.ng earlier reported that former Twitter employees who were fired in Ghana in November 2022 were not given any severance compensation, and the company has not contacted them in three months.
According to a source, the corporation mistreated the employees since the layoff. He added that no attempt was made to negotiate a severance until it was covered by worldwide media and the Ghanaian labour office became interested.
Another source disclosed that everyone is exhausted and irate.
Source: Legit.ng
