Thousands of users experienced a disruption on X, previously known as Twitter, this afternoon.
According to Down Detector, issues with Elon Musk’s social media platform began surfacing around 13:30 GMT, impacting users worldwide.
In the UK, over 10,000 incidents have been documented, while the US has reported more than 42,000 cases.
The cause of the outage remains uncertain, though 57% of the reports pertain to problems with the X app.
Additionally, 20% of users are encountering issues with the feed or timeline, and 17% are facing difficulties accessing the website.
The Daily Mail attempted to use X on the iOS app but encountered an error message stating, “Posts aren’t loading right now.”
On the X website, tweets also aren’t loading, while the error message reads: ‘Something went wrong. Try reloading.’
The reason for the outage remains unclear, although Cloudflare – the platform on which X runs – has denied any involvement.
X (formerly Twitter) has crashed for thousands of users this afternoon. According to Down Detector, the problems with Elon Musk’s social media platform started at around 13:30 GMT, and are affecting users globally
With X down, many users have flocked to Meta’s rival app, Threads, to discuss the outage.
‘Is it just me or is X down again?’ one user asked.
Another added: ‘Seems my X (formerly Twitter) is down cos I can’t load anything on my phone and on my computer…is someone experiencing the same?’
And one joked: ‘When Twitter down this where I come.’
This isn’t the first time X has crashed in recent months.
The outage comes just two months after X crashed twice, following repeated Cloudflare blackouts.
On 5 December, Cloudflare experienced a massive outage, knocking dozens of major websites offline.
Among those affected were Zoom, Canva, Discord, LinkedIn, Deliveroo, Substack, Shopify, Coinbase and Vinted.
So far, more than 10,000 problems have been logged on DownDetector in the UK
Over in the US, there have been more than 42,000 reports over the X outage
On Reddit, one user posted: ‘Here we go again, it’s down!’
Someone relied: ‘Business haulted. Second time in a month. It’s too much for service as crucial as this. Something needs to be done.’
While a third said: ‘imagine how much money businesses are losing.’
It marked the second outage in less than a month for Cloudflare, which powers internet requests for millions of websites.
Shortly after, Cloudflare admitted in a blog post that its network began ‘experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic’.
The Silicon Valley company is the foundation of an estimated fifth of all websites worldwide.
Richard Ford, chief technical officer at Integrity360, said Friday’s episode underlines how much of the internet now depends on a handful of infrastructure providers.
‘For businesses, today is a wake‑up call,’ the expert said. ‘Relying entirely on a single provider for critical infrastructure is a fragile strategy.
‘Today’s disruption underscores something many of us in cybersecurity and tech have long warned about – as the internet has grown more complex, a handful of infrastructure providers end up holding unexpectedly large power over its functioning.
‘Cloudflare sits at the heart of that, providing CDN, proxying, routing, DNS and caching so that websites can stay fast, secure and resilient under load.
‘When a provider like this fails, whether due to internal error, configuration change or external attack, the ripple effects hit far more than just a few sites.
‘What feels like one outage to a user is actually a systemic failure affecting traffic flows across many unrelated organisations.’
