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Elon Musk-owned AI chatbot Grok faced service disruption on Friday, May 15, with users across regions reporting problems accessing the platform, generating responses and logging into the application.
According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, 71% of issues were reported in the mobile application, 28% users reported issues with website and 1% faced login problems.
Several users said the chatbot was returning blank responses, failing to process prompts and displaying “high demand” messages on both X (formerly Twitter) and the standalone Grok application. Screenshots shared on social media also appeared to show the chatbot failing to answer user queries.
The latest outage adds to a string of recurring technical issues that have affected Grok in recent months. Users had experienced delayed responses, login failures and repeated “high demand” notifications during periods of elevated traffic and software updates.
Developed by xAI and integrated with X, Grok has emerged as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini since launching in 2023.
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xAI has not issued an official statement as of yet, while its public system status page continued to show services as operational.
Users unable to access data, various features
Some Reddit users claimed their existing chats had disappeared, while others said Grok’s “Imagine” feature was not functioning and file uploads for new chats had stopped working.
A few users speculated that the disruption could be linked to a system migration, server rollback or a major update being rolled out by xAI.
"All my chats are gone too," one Reddit user wrote, while another said they suspected "nothing is gone" and that the data was temporarily inaccessible as xAI pushed a major update, as per NDTV Profit.
Another user reportedly said they had waited for their video limit to reset early in the morning in India to continue work on an unfinished project, but were unable to proceed because the servers appeared to be down.
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A user wrote in the comment section of Downdetector that the release of a new model has caused the outage. "They added it and broke some stuff, now they need to do a little brain surgery to make it work right. This is the month that they planned on dropping 4.4 and 4.5, right?"
According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, 71% of issues were reported in the mobile application, 28% users reported issues with website and 1% faced login problems.
Several users said the chatbot was returning blank responses, failing to process prompts and displaying “high demand” messages on both X (formerly Twitter) and the standalone Grok application. Screenshots shared on social media also appeared to show the chatbot failing to answer user queries.
Grok outage reported on Downdetector (Screenshot)
The latest outage adds to a string of recurring technical issues that have affected Grok in recent months. Users had experienced delayed responses, login failures and repeated “high demand” notifications during periods of elevated traffic and software updates.
Developed by xAI and integrated with X, Grok has emerged as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini since launching in 2023.
Also Read | HCLTech teams up with Red Hat to help companies scale AI faster
xAI has not issued an official statement as of yet, while its public system status page continued to show services as operational.
Users unable to access data, various features
Some Reddit users claimed their existing chats had disappeared, while others said Grok’s “Imagine” feature was not functioning and file uploads for new chats had stopped working.
A few users speculated that the disruption could be linked to a system migration, server rollback or a major update being rolled out by xAI.
"All my chats are gone too," one Reddit user wrote, while another said they suspected "nothing is gone" and that the data was temporarily inaccessible as xAI pushed a major update, as per NDTV Profit.
Another user reportedly said they had waited for their video limit to reset early in the morning in India to continue work on an unfinished project, but were unable to proceed because the servers appeared to be down.
Also Read | HCLTech to lead $300 million Sarvam AI round with $150 million bet at $1.5 billion valuation
A user wrote in the comment section of Downdetector that the release of a new model has caused the outage. "They added it and broke some stuff, now they need to do a little brain surgery to make it work right. This is the month that they planned on dropping 4.4 and 4.5, right?"
