X down for thousands of users following rumours of a social media site ban

Thousands of social media users have reported experiencing problems accessing X, according to the Downdetector website.

By 2.25pm this afternoon (13 January), as many as 7,000 users had recorded issues across the UK and the US.

The main issue people seem to be stumbling across is getting onto the X homepage, with the mobile app experiencing similar problems.

The website, formerly known as Twitter, seems to be working fine for some people and not for others, with no word on what could be causing the current issues. Ironically, the social media site seems filled with posts about people reporting issues — despite being on the site to post.

This isn't the first time X has experienced an outage, with similar problems reported in November last year, just days after a huge global internet outage sparked by Cloudflare going down.

On 18 November, Cloudflare, which provides security to websites and apps all over the world, experienced technical issues which caused a huge ripple effect on websites like X, ChatGPT, Bet365, Canva, Ikea and Google Gemini, to name a few.

Shockingly, the incident was the third of its kind, coming just weeks after two major outages from Amazon's AWS, which saw blackouts across the likes of Snapchat, Roblox, HMRC, Amazon and many more, followed by Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, affecting Minecraft, Xbox and Asda Online, plus thousands of others.

The current outage comes hot off the heels of speculation Elon Musk's social media site could be banned in the UK, after Ofcom launched a formal investigation into whether it has failed to comply with UK law.

It comes after ministers called on the regulator to use its 'full legal powers', after unlawful AI images were created on the website using the Grok chatbot.

Grok had been reported numerous times for removing the clothes of people in photos without their consent. In response to the complaints, X limited the ability to edit photos to those who pay a monthly fee, but ministers say this isn't good enough.

“It is an insult and totally unacceptable for Grok to still allow this if you’re willing to pay for it," tech secretary Liz Kendall said. "I expect Ofcom to use the full legal powers parliament has given them."

Writing in the Telegraph, she added: "Sexually manipulating images of women and children is despicable and abhorrent."

In response, Musk has branded Kendall and other ministers who have spoken out as 'fascist,' and says they want to 'suppress free speech.'