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Thousands of users experienced disruptions on Tuesday afternoon when X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, suffered a temporary outage.

Reports of issues began around 4:20 p.m. Eastern Time, according to the outage-tracking service DownDetector, with complaints quickly surging past 20,000. Despite the spike, some users indicated they were still able to access the platform without interruption.

In response to user concerns, X’s AI chatbot Grok acknowledged the disruption, stating: “X is down for some users right now due to a brief technical outage—feeds not loading, errors popping up.

“No official cause released yet (common with these short spikes). Should be back online soon based on patterns from recent incidents.”

The Independent said it has reached out to X seeking clarification on the cause of the outage.

Data from DownDetector showed that 46 percent of reported issues were linked to the mobile app, while 27 percent of users cited problems with their feeds and timelines. Another 16 percent reported that the website was entirely inaccessible.

By approximately 5 p.m. ET, service appeared to have largely returned to normal, according to DownDetector’s metrics.

Frustration among users was visible on competing platforms, including Bluesky, where one user wrote: “Why does it seem like X goes down or struggles to load at least once a week now???”

Tuesday’s outage follows similar disruptions reported in both January and February.

Some users reacted with humor to the brief downtime. “X was down for few minutes and I didn’t know what app to check,” one user wrote Tuesday, adding a laughing emoji.