X is down as thousands report issues on Downdetector days after global internet outage

Thousands of people have taken to Downdetector to report that social media site X, formerly Twitter, is down.

More than 5,000 people have recorded issues, with the vast majority appearing to cite problems with the app.

Around 63 per cent of complaints relate to the app, while 26 per cent of reports refer to issues with the website, owned by Elon Musk. The remaining 11 per cent, however, said they were having problems with their feed.

It comes just days after the third huge outage that has rocked the internet since last month, when Cloudflare went down, bringing down thousands of websites with it.

On 18 November, Cloudflare, which provides security to websites and apps all over the world, experienced technical issues which caused a huge ripple effect on websites like X, ChatGPT, Bet365, Canva, Ikea and Google Gemini, to name a few.

All the areas reporting issues with X (Downdetector)

Shockingly, the incident was the third of its kind, coming just weeks after two major outages from Amazon's AWS, which saw blackouts across the likes of Snapchat, Roblox, HMRC, Amazon and many more, followed by Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, affecting Minecraft, Xbox and Asda Online, plus thousands of others.

In the meantime, X seems to be working fine for some people and not for others, with no word on what could be causing the current issues.

Currently, people in London appear to be the worst affected in England, with additional reports coming from Birmingham and Manchester. Up in Scotland, however, Glasgow also appears badly affected, as well as Northern Ireland's Belfast.

The first issues appear to have been reported at 3.20pm today (21 November) and seem ongoing at the time of writing.

X was also one of the websites that was impacted by Cloudflare's outage earlier this week, though there's no suggestion this has any connection to the problems being reported today.

Cloudflare cited the cause of the issue as being a 'spike in unusual traffic' - though it admitted it did not know the reason for this.

The cause is currently unknown (Subaas Shrestha/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors," they added in a statement.

Sadly, an expert has warned these kinds of issues are only going to keep happening, with huge blackouts 'inevitable'.

"Although outages are not uncommon, a global 'completely down and out' outage like this is absolutely, highly unusual, and there is no doubt that this has a wide-reaching impact worldwide for businesses and their users," explained Lee Skillen, CTO of software artefact management platform Cloudsmith.

He told the Independent: "Modern infrastructure is built on deeply interconnected systems; the more we optimise for scale, the more challenging it becomes to pinpoint how one failure cascades into another. Will this happen more frequently? The short answer is yes. Expect things to fail."

Skillen went on to say these failures can range from 'mild and short-lived' to 'rare and catastrophic', but noted the one thing they all share in common: 'inevitability'.

"Every service with real users will eventually get hit by something; sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly," he added. "The greater the magnitude, the greater the possibility."