X, formerly known as Twitter, went offline for thousands of users on Friday as a major Cloudflare issue disrupted large sections of the internet. Reports on Downdetector surged within minutes, with users in the UK, India and the US saying they were unable to load timelines, send messages or even open the platform.
So far, X hasn't made any public comment on the outage.
Downdetector, which itself struggled to stay online because it also relies on Cloudflare services, showed a sharp spike in outage reports shortly after 11.30am UK time. Many users saw error pages instead of feeds, while others found that refreshing the app only produced a “something went wrong” message.
Although X has had its share of service interruptions in the past year, this incident appears to be tied to a wider Cloudflare failure rather than a platform-specific problem. Cloudflare powers core infrastructure for some of the world’s biggest websites. When it falters, the effects cascade across the internet. Alongside X, websites like Letterboxd and other popular services were hit by similar errors.
Cloudflare confirmed it was “aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers”. The company did not specify the cause, and it offered no immediate timeline for a fix. Another update followed around 15 minutes later saying investigations were ongoing, but it again avoided giving details.
For X users, the impact was significant because Cloudflare handles content delivery and protection for the platform. Even brief interruptions can make the service feel completely inaccessible. As some pages intermittently loaded on refresh, many assumed the issue was isolated to X, only to realise the problem was far broader.
The outage underlined how dependent major platforms have become on a handful of infrastructure providers. A single technical fault can ripple across the web within minutes, and today X found itself right at the centre of that disruption.
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