Twitter Down : Major Internet Outage : A major internet disruption hit users worldwide as X (formerly Twitter) and several other popular websites went offline on Thursday evening. Users were unable to view posts, refresh timelines, or upload new tweets on the platform. The outage also affected Downdetector, the popular website-tracking portal that usually reports such breakdowns — leaving millions unable to verify what was happening.
Cloudflare Outage at the Centre of the Crash
The widespread failure was triggered by an outage at Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure provider that powers countless websites and online platforms. Cloudflare offers essential backend services—including security, traffic routing, and performance optimisation—and any disruption in its network impacts large portions of the global web.
Users visiting websites supported by Cloudflare were met with an error message stating:
“Internal server error on Cloudflare’s network, please try again in a few minutes.”
According to early reports, the outage began around 5 PM IST, affecting social media platforms, news websites, and technology services across multiple regions.
Cloudflare Confirms the Issue, Begins Recovery
Cloudflare acknowledged the technical problem on its status page, stating:
“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.”
“Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”
A short while later, the company shared a partial recovery update:
“We’ve deployed a change which has restored dashboard services. We are still working to remediate broad application services impact.”
Cloudflare also noted that Cloudflare Access and WARP services had returned to pre-outage levels, indicating gradual stabilisation.
Multiple Global Platforms Affected
According to The Independent, the outage impacted a broad range of websites that rely on Cloudflare for DNS services and infrastructure. While some platforms showed minor disruptions, others—including X—were completely inaccessible for users.
This breakdown came at a time when internet reliability was already under scrutiny following recent downtime incidents.
Follows Days After Major AWS Outage
The Cloudflare failure occurred just days after a massive outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS). The AWS glitch impacted major platforms such as:
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Amazon
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Snapchat
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WhatsApp
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Several financial and airline services
The root cause of the AWS outage was traced to the company’s oldest data centre in Virginia, USA, where a Domain Name System (DNS) failure rendered hundreds of websites unusable for hours.
Root Cause Still Unknown
As of now, Cloudflare has not provided a detailed explanation for the disruption. With services slowly being restored, users may still face delays in accessing platforms like X until full functionality resumes.
For the moment, global users are left waiting—and watching—as Cloudflare engineers work to fully resolve the incident.