Elon Musk’s social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), faced a significant disruption on Friday afternoon, which adversely affected users across the United States. This outage, lasting several hours, compounded the difficulties Musk is experiencing, as his $44 billion investment in X appears increasingly vulnerable.

The incident commenced around 2:30 PM ET, preventing users from accessing the platform or utilizing its services, which led to a spike in complaints on outage-monitoring websites like Downdetector. As the outage persisted into the afternoon, more than 50,000 reports from frustrated users were logged, with the majority of issues reported in the eastern United States. Initially, the technical problems seemed to impact larger metropolitan areas along the East Coast, but the most severe disruptions were noted in major Midwestern cities such as Dallas, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Furthermore, users from other regions, including Atlanta, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, reported challenges in logging in or accessing the platform’s features.

For many, this recent incident underscored the ongoing difficulties Musk has faced in overseeing X. Within a few hours, the outage led to a loss of millions in the platform’s value, raising concerns about the long-term viability of Musk’s $44 billion acquisition made in 2022.

While the platform’s stock price remained steady at around $43 per share during the outage, the potential long-term effects on the company’s reputation could be far-reaching. As the outage continued, user frustration on X grew.

Many users turned to alternative social media platforms to voice their dissatisfaction, with some directly criticizing Musk for the irony of the world’s wealthiest individual struggling to maintain the service he purchased for an astonishing $44 billion. One particularly frustrated user tweeted: “Elon is literally the richest man alive and is still unable to keep his service running.”Alongside the frustration of not being able to access their accounts, many X users expressed concern that they had been banned from the platform, as they received error messages suggesting they were not authorized to use the service. This uncertainty prompted users to speculate about potential violations of platform policies, only to later realize that the outage was far more widespread than they had initially thought.