Today, the widely-used social media platform X, previously known as Twitter, has experienced a significant outage, leaving millions of users in the lurch. Reports of this disruption began surfacing around 15:14 GMT, with users from various parts of the globe encountering difficulties.

Down Detector, a service that tracks website issues, has noted a substantial spike in complaints. In the UK alone, over 19,000 users have reported problems. Meanwhile, across the pond in the United States, nearly 75,000 users have expressed similar frustrations.

Analyzing the nature of these issues, it’s clear that the majority of UK users, about 58%, are grappling with the app itself. Meanwhile, 34% are finding the website problematic. A smaller segment, roughly 7%, have reported troubles specifically related to their feed or timeline.

In an attempt to assess the situation firsthand, the Daily Mail attempted to access the X website but was met with a ‘connection timed out’ error message, confirming the widespread nature of the disruption.

The remaining seven per cent said the problem was with their feed/timeline. 

The Daily Mail tried to access the X website, but received an error message reading ‘connection timed out’. 

The X iPhone app also would not load, with the dreaded ‘spinning wheel of death’ appearing on screen.  

While the reason for the outage remains unclear, it may be linked to scheduled maintenance by Cloudflare – the network upon which X runs. 

It’s the go–to social media platform for millions of people around the world, but it appears that X has crashed this afternoon

Cloudflare’s status page explains that scheduled maintenance is ‘currently in progress’ in St Louis. 

‘We will provide updates as necessary,’ it added. 

With X down, many users have flocked to Meta’s rival app, Threads, to discuss the outage. 

‘X is down again,’ one user posted, alongside the eye–rolling emoji. 

Another added: ‘Surprise, surprise..X (Twitter) is down again. Threads is far superior.’

And one joked: ‘Twitter is down guys. So, this is where we hang when Twitter is down? Or am I in the wrong social network?’

The outage comes just over a month after Cloudflare had two blackouts within weeks. 

On 5 December, Cloudflare experienced a massive outage, knocking dozens of major websites offline. 

In the UK, more than 19,000 problems have been logged, while almost 75,000 issues have been logged in the US

Among those affected were Zoom, Canva, Discord, LinkedIn, Deliveroo, Substack, Shopify, Coinbase and Vinted. 

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.

With X down, many users have flocked to Meta’s rival app, Threads, to discuss the outage

‘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.’