Elon Musk’s X suffers second outage this week amid mounting AI scandal

Elon Musk’s X social media platform suffered its second major outage of the week on Thursday, with tens of thousands of users reporting issues accessing the service.

The outage began around 10 a.m. Eastern Time, according to the monitoring site Down Detector, which recorded nearly 80,000 reports. Users reported that the website and mobile app, formerly known as Twitter, failed to load or functioned sporadically before displaying error messages.

The technical failure comes as the platform faces a wave of criticism involving its Grok chatbot. Recent reports indicate the AI tool has been used to fulfill user requests to edit real photographs of women and children into non-consensual violent and sexual imagery.

Concerns regarding the platform’s operational stability and content moderation have intensified since 2022. Musk laid off the majority of the company’s workforce shortly after taking over the firm.

While X has remained largely functional since the acquisition, the platform has experienced several notable outages over the past year.

Two significant service disruptions within a single week mark more than mere technical glitches; they signal a systemic erosion of X’s operational integrity. This decline is the predictable consequence of Elon Musk’s 2022 decision to aggressively gut the platform’s core engineering and operations teams. Early warnings from the tech community regarding long-term instability are now manifesting as reality.

The crisis is compounded by the concurrent controversy surrounding the Grok AI chatbot, exposing a dual-track failure: the decay of physical infrastructure and the total collapse of content oversight. The ease with which proprietary AI tools are being exploited to generate harmful content highlights a catastrophic breakdown in internal safeguards and moderation protocols. For remaining advertisers, the convergence of technical fragility and a volatile safety environment presents an untenable risk profile, likely accelerating the ongoing exodus of brand capital from the platform.

For Vietnamese-Americans, particularly political activists and news junkies, disruptions to X have significantly altered the flow of information and digital discourse. However, the direct economic impact on small businesses—from the nail salon industry to local phở restaurants—is minimal. Across hubs like Little Saigon, Facebook and Instagram remain the primary marketing tools for the community, ensuring that day-to-day business remains largely unaffected by shifts in the social media landscape.