Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) experienced a major outage on Friday afternoon, significantly impacting users in the U.S. The outage, which lasted several hours, added to the challenges Musk is facing as his $44 billion investment in X looks increasingly precarious.

The incident began around 2:30 p.m. ET, while users were unable to access the platform or use its services, leading to an increase in reports for loss monitoring sites like Downetectors.

By the time the outage continued into the afternoon, more than 50,000 reports had been filed by disgruntled users, with the majority of issues concentrated in the eastern United States. Initially, the technical difficulties appeared to affect larger metropolitan areas along the East Coast, but the most significant issues were identified in major cities in the Midwest, including Dallas, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Additionally, users in other locations, such as Atlanta, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City, reported difficulties logging into or accessing platform features.

For many, the latest incident underscored the ongoing challenges Musk has faced in running X. Within hours, the failure has led to millions of dollars in losses in the platform’s value and raised concerns about the long-term sustainability of Musk’s $202 billion acquisition.

While the platform’s stock price remained stable at around $43 per share on the day of the announcement, the potential long-term impact on the company’s reputation could be much more profound. As the failure continued, frustration among X’s users grew.

Many have taken to alternative social media platforms to voice their displeasure, with some directly criticizing Musk for the irony of the world’s richest individuals, the service he acquired for a whopping $44 billion. One particularly irate user tweeted: “Elon is literally the richest man alive and still can’t run his d*mn website, do your job.”

In addition to the inconvenience of not being able to access their accounts, several X users feared they had been banned by the platform only to file bug reports indicating that they were not authorized to use the service. This confusion led users to speculate that they had somehow violated the platform’s policy, only to later determine that the flaw was more widespread than originally realized.