Massive internet outage as X, Facebook and more popular sites down for people worldwide

A number of websites are intermittently down amid a technical issue with content delivery network Cloudflare.

Many users who trying to access the likes of X, Facebook and bet365 have temporarily been unable to do so - even tracking website Down Detector was down this morning (18 November).

It comes after a third of the internet who relied on Amazon Web Services (AWS) were experiencing issues at pretty much the same time last month.

Earlier on, Cloudflare said they were 'aware of the issue', as affected users were met with an 'internal server error on Cloudflare’s network' message. It also asked users to 'please try again in a few minutes'.

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company said, as many of the websites appear to be back up and then going back down.

What will we do without X? (Getty Stock Images)

“Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”

In an update, the network said they 'are seeing services recover, but customers may continue to observe higher-than-normal error rates as we continue remediation efforts'.

"We are continuing to investigate this issue," they added.

Internet users had been taking to Reddit to vent their frustrations, as one person wrote: "Cloudflare down? Twitter etc isn't working?"

Both X and Cloudflare have been down this morning (Down Detector)

"I got the same issue here!" another replied.

While a third added: "I came here specifically to see if this was the case lol. I never realised just how much stuff uses Cloudflare until things are down! I wonder what caused it!"

Well, the company also noted that 'responses on customer inquiries are not affected, and customers can still reach us via live chat (Business and Enterprise) through the Cloudflare Dashboard, or via the emergency telephone line (Enterprise)'.

"We are working alongside our third party provider to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem," they said.

Users keep reporting outages (Getty Stock Images)

Cloudflare say they are 'trusted by millions of organisations' around the world and are focused on 'blocking billions of threats online for its customers every day'.

In a press release from last year, the company said 'about 20 percent of the web runs through Cloudflare’s network, in addition to Internet properties like mobile apps, APIs, AI workflows, and corporate networks'.

"Cloudflare has millions of customers, of which more than 221,000 are paying customers including 35 percent of the Fortune 500 companies," they wrote.

The company noted that they 'blocked on average 165 billion cyber threats per day'.