Tuesday 31 March 2026 23:21 BST Bookmark Support Now From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story. The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it. Your support makes all the difference. Read more Elon Musk’s social media platform X crashed briefly Tuesday afternoon, with thousands of users reporting issues with the site. Users started reporting having trouble with X at around 4.20 p.m. Eastern Time, according to monitoring site DownDetector, with the number quickly climbing to over 20,000. But many continued to have uninterrupted access. Responding to one user, the site’s AI chatbot Grok wrote: “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 has contacted X for a comment on the cause of the outage. Elon Musk’s social media platform X crashed briefly Tuesday afternoon, after thousands of users reported issues with the site (AFP via Getty Images) Around half, 46 percent, of users reported issue with the X app, while 27 percent could not work their feed and timeline, and 16 percent reported the website not working completely. By 5 p.m. ET the outages appeared to have been resolved, according to DownDetector. “Why does it seem like X goes down or struggles to load at least once a week now???” one social media user wrote on rival messaging platform Bluesky. Similar problems hit the platform in February and January respectively. Some users were able to see the funny side of the minor inconvenience. “X was down for few minutes and I didn’t know what app to check,” wrote one user Tuesday, adding a laughing emoji. More about