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Elon Musk's X recovers after 'outage' hits thousands globally

Users reported difficulties accessing services, sending messages, and maintaining stable connections during the disruptions

By AFP & Reuters
February 16, 2026
The X app icon on a smartphone in this illustration taken October 27, 2025. — Reuters
The X app icon on a smartphone in this illustration taken October 27, 2025. — Reuters

Service was restored to X, the social network owned by Elon Musk, on Monday afternoon after users in several countries, including Pakistan, experienced disruptions.

The site was displaying content, allowing users to post and otherwise functioning normally again around 1530 GMT, after the Down Detector tracking website reported a spike in outage reports around two hours before.

X had appeared to be suffering "international outages," connectivity monitor Netblocks posted on the open-source social network Mastodon during the disruption.

The breakdown was "not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering", added Netblocks, which regularly flags technical issues with popular online services and sites as well as interference by national governments.

This chart shows a view of problem reports submitted in the past 24 hours compared to the typical volume of reports by time of day. — Downdetector
This chart shows a view of problem reports submitted in the past 24 hours compared to the typical volume of reports by time of day. — Downdetector

Its most recent posts about similar outages for X came on February 9, the day after the Super Bowl in the US, and February 1.

AFP journalists in countries including France and Thailand had also been unable to access X on Monday afternoon.

Spokespeople for X did not respond to AFP's request for comment on the outage before service was restored.

Musk laid off thousands of people at the former Twitter and changed its name after buying the service in 2022.

He has since merged it with his xAI company, which develops the Grok chatbot.

xAI is set to in turn be absorbed by Musk's rocket firm SpaceX, with that merged entity expected to go public as early as summer this year.