Elon Musk’s X down today: How Twitter users reacted to global outage

Another user Noorie (@nuradeeeen) posted, “X is down, can you reply this?”, asking if anyone was able to respond.

Afia Dimple (@AfiaDimple_) said X went down, asking followers if they could see her tweet.

Gunther Eagleman (@GuntherEagleman) similarly posted, “Is X down? Can you see this post?”

Soon after, even down detector stopped working. @immasiddx pointed out and explained, “X and many other platforms were down for a while due to a Cloudflare issue. The funny part? Even Downdetector was down.”

Cloudfare hit

Web infrastructure company Cloudflare has been hit with a major outage, which is the likely cause behind multiple websites across the internet facing crash reports.

The websites affected are Elon Musk-owned X, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity, among several other services, according to outage tracker Downdetector.com.

The company first reported experiencing “an internal service degradation” at 5:18pm (IST). The incident comes nearly a month after a massive outage hit cloud services provider Amazon Web Services (AWS), taking down swathes of the internet.

Acting as a bridge between users and websites, Cloudfare handles an average of 81 million HTTP requests per second and serves over 63 million HTTP(S) requests per second on average, including millions of internet properties. In addition to this, it handles an average of over 42 million DNS requests per second.

It operates across 120 countries. Hence, any inconsistency in the web infra company can act as a potential single-point-of-failure for millions of users worldwide.