X, Grok Outage Reports Spike and Then Subside

Against a backdrop of intense scrutiny over AI-generated nonconsensual images, the social media site and its AI chatbot had issues Friday morning.

On Friday morning, the social media site X (formerly Twitter) owned by Elon Musk was offline as reports of an outage spiked. Within about 90 minutes, the issue seemed to have been resolved.

The outage reporting site Downdetector showed reports shooting up starting just before 7 a.m. PT (10 a.m. ET) to a peak of more than 50,000. Grok, Musk's AI chatbot, also showed a surge at the same time, though in a smaller volume. (Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.) 

Internet service companies Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services also showed small bumps in outage reports.

The outage at X comes as the company faces intense scrutiny over nonconsensual sexualized ...