X under pressure: outages, ‘foreign’ political accounts and a racist crypto tweet

Elon Musk’s social media platform X has faced a series of uncomfortable headlines in recent days: a large outage that knocked the service offline for thousands of users worldwide, a new account-location feature that revealed multiple political profiles as being operated from abroad, and a separate racism scandal involving the prediction-market platform Polymarket on X.

According to outage-tracking site Downdetector and multiple media reports, X experienced a significant disruption in mid-November that affected users across the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Complaints peaked at thousands of reports within a short period, as people struggled to access the app, website and content feeds. Some users were able to open X but could not load posts or videos.

The incident coincided with major technical issues at web-infrastructure company Cloudflare, which protects and routes traffic for millions of websites.

The same problem temporarily affected several other large services, including OpenAI, Facebook, Amazon Web Services, Spotify and gaming platforms, before Cloudflare said it had identified the cause and deployed a fix. X did not immediately comment on the outage, which local media described as the latest in a series of technical disruptions this year.

At roughly the same time, X rolled out a transparency tool that has reshaped debate around political speech on the platform.

The new “About This Account” feature displays the country or broader region where an account is based, using signals such as app-store region and network data.

To see this information, users tap or click the signup date on a profile. In countries with strict speech restrictions, the feature allows people to show only a regional label — for example, “South Asia” instead of a specific state.

Online researchers quickly began checking prominent political profiles, particularly those supporting Donald Trump and the broader MAGA movement.

Several accounts with American flags, photos from U.S. campaign rallies and usernames like @TRUMP_ARMY or @MAGANationX turned out to be based in regions such as South Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe, rather than in the United States.

An account styling itself as Barron Trump news, for example, listed “Mar-a-Lago” in its bio but was labelled by X as located in “Eastern Europe (Non-EU)”.

NewsGuard, a firm that tracks online misinformation, identified several of these pages as heavy spreaders of misleading or polarising narratives about U.S. politics — including claims that Democrats bribed moderators during a 2024 presidential debate.

The revelations revived long-standing concerns about foreign-run influence accounts and the ease with which such profiles can blend into domestic conversation.

X’s head of product Nikita Bier called the location label “an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square” and promised further tools to help users verify the authenticity of what they see.

At the same time, experts and users warned that the feature is not foolproof: virtual private networks and some internet providers’ routing practices can obscure a person’s true location, and X itself occasionally attaches a notice that the data may be inaccurate.

Several commentators also questioned whether revealing approximate locations might verge on an invasion of privacy, even if the labels are sometimes imprecise.

While X was trying to position itself as more transparent, a related controversy erupted around one of the platforms that rely on it for outreach. Polymarket, a rapidly growing crypto-based prediction market, came under fire after its affiliate account Polymarket Traders (@PolymarketTrade) posted — and then deleted — a tweet that many readers condemned as racist.

According to reports from Hindustan Times and crypto news site Protos, the since-removed post singled out users from India, Turkey and Nigeria who were allegedly “LARPing as egirls” and warned that they could lose a special affiliate badge.

The tweet used the ethnic slur “jeet”, told people to “get your last slop posts in before then” and signed off with “love & gratitude”. Screenshots of the message spread quickly across X, where traders, crypto commentators and other users accused the company of normalising anti-Indian racism and unprofessional behaviour.

Polymarket has not yet issued a formal public statement about the incident, and the main affiliate account now shows no trace of the original tweet.

Some high-volume traders and media partners have publicly distanced themselves from the platform’s outreach programme, while others are demanding a clear apology and explanation.

The backlash has added to broader concerns raised by researchers about anti-Indian hate speech on X and about how social-media-driven financial platforms handle community management and content moderation.

Taken together, the outage, the location-label feature and the Polymarket scandal highlight the range of issues currently facing X and the wider ecosystem of services built around it: technical reliability during major infrastructure failures, transparency over who is behind influential accounts and the reputational risks that arise when official or semi-official channels post discriminatory content.