Thousands of users worldwide are grappling with a significant outage on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The disruptions began just after 11:20 GMT, as reported by Down Detector, a service that tracks such incidents. By 11:30 GMT, the number of complaints had surged to over 3,250, with 58% of users citing issues with the X app itself.

A breakdown of these reports reveals that 23% of users encountered problems accessing the website, while 10% faced server connection difficulties. Simultaneously, Cloudflare, a major provider of network services for numerous websites, is experiencing what could be a substantial outage. At the same time, Down Detector registered over 10,500 reports of disruptions related to Cloudflare. The situation prompted many to take to social media, expressing concern about broader internet issues. One user humorously remarked, “X is down, Cloudflare down. Pack up people, day is over.”

The outage map from Down Detector indicates that the issues with X are widespread, affecting users in the UK across cities like London, Manchester, Cardiff, and Glasgow, among others. In response to being unable to access their preferred social media platform, many have turned to Threads, a rival service, to voice their frustrations. One disgruntled user questioned, “Why is my Twitter now X not working?” while another quipped, “Never thought I’d be checking Threads to see if Twitter is down.”

While another joked: ‘Guess we all come on here when Twitter is down.’ Meanwhile, commenters on the X rival Bluesky happily welcomed the news and wave of returning users. One commenter wrote: ‘Twitter is down. Good. Stay that way.’ ‘Funny how fast everyone suddenly swarms back to bluesky, the second Twitter is down,’ chimed in another. Another Bluesky user wrote: ‘Twitter went down…this site is still working!!’

X has not released a statement to confirm the issue, but it could be connected to the Cloudflare outage, which is reporting a similarly wide set of problems. Cloudflare is an internet infrastructure provider that offers many of the core technologies that allow internet experiences to run smoothly. That includes critical tools that protect websites from cyber attacks and keep them online during spikes of heavy traffic. Sites like X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bet365 and games like League of Legends all rely on Cloudflare’s web services to operate.

Since Cloudflare began reporting disruption, all of these sites have shown similar spikes in outage reports. Even Down Detector, which monitors reports of internet outages, was briefly taken offline by the disruption. Affected users saw a message warning them that there was an ‘internal server error on Cloudflare’s network’. Of those affected by the Cloudflare outage, 50 per cent said they were having a problem with ‘server connection’ functions.

A further 37 per cent said they could not access the Cloudflare website, while 13 per cent of users said they were having issues hosting their own web services. In a statement, the company said that it was experiencing issues with its global network. The company added: ‘Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.

‘Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.’ This comes just weeks after Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure took down dozens of websites when their cloud processing services crashed. As these enormous outages brought ‘half the internet’ to a standstill, experts have warned against relying on a handful of companies for so many internet services.