Elon Musk's X experienced a major outage on Monday, affecting thousands of users globally before services were restored. The disruption coincided with a Cloudflare outage, raising questions about the cause.
Immediate Action & Core Facts
Outage Details: X, formerly Twitter, faced widespread issues starting around 9 a.m. ET (9 p.m. Singapore time), with over 27,000 reports of problems in the U.S. alone, according to Downdetector. Reports peaked at 25,000 in the U.S., 3,400 in Canada, and 9,000 in the U.K. before declining sharply. Users reported difficulties loading the app, accessing feeds, and posting messages.
Recovery: By late Monday, the number of reported issues had dropped significantly, with X largely back online. The outage lasted several hours, during which users migrated to rival platforms like Threads and Bluesky to vent frustrations.
Deeper Dive & Context
Cloudflare Connection: The outage coincided with a Cloudflare alert about increased error rates across multiple services, including its CDN, analytics, and Durable Objects. Cloudflare identified the issue and began implementing a fix, suggesting a potential link to X's disruption. The timing of the outage (14:35 BST) aligned closely with Cloudflare's reported issues.
User Impact: About half of the complaints involved the app failing to load, while others cited frozen timelines or inability to access the site. Some users reported intermittent issues with posting and messaging. The Daily Mail noted that not all users were affected, as its team could load X's main feed on both mobile and desktop.
No Official Statement: X has not issued a statement acknowledging the outage or explaining its cause. SpaceX, which owns X, did not respond to Reuters' request for comment.
Broader Disruptions: Downdetector also showed elevated problem reports for other platforms, including Reddit, Zoom, Robinhood, Canva, and Microsoft Teams, though none reached the scale of X's outage. This raised questions about whether Cloudflare's incident contributed to the broader wave of disruptions.
User Reactions: Many X users turned to Threads to discuss the outage, with some joking about the platform's instability and others expressing frustration over reliance on X for work, news, or real-time updates.