X hit by 'international outages': monitors
X (formerly Twitter) went dark for millions of users on Monday, as a major outage wiped timelines across the globe. Internet observatory NetBlocks confirmed that while the site remained reachable, backend failures prevented posts from loading in Europe, the US, and Asia.
- Tech
- AFP
- Published Date: 06:36 | 16 February 2026
Elon Musk-owned social network X was failing to show posts to users in many countries Monday, monitors said, the latest in a series of interruptions.
X appeared to be suffering "international outages," connectivity monitor Netblocks posted on the open-source social network Mastodon.
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.
Its most recent posts about similar outages for X came on February 9, the day of the Super Bowl in the US, and February 1.
There was also a spike in user reports of problems with X at around 0130 GMT Monday, according to aggregation website Down Detector.
AFP journalists in countries including France and Thailand were also unable to access X.
Spokespeople for X did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment.
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.