Twitter (X) down: Why is the social media network not working? When will it come back online?

Elon, seriously stop pressing all the damn buttons. Once again, everyone’s favourite/most hated [delete as appropriate] social media network went down, with a message normally welcoming new people to the site presented to its users.

This comes as yet another instance of the site being brought to a standstill for unknown reasons, with Cloudfare being the latest culprit we are aware of.

We’re not sure when Twitter will be back, presumably when Elon has taken whatever appendage out of the plug socket he’s managed to wiggle in there.

Parts of the internet were brought to a standstill early Tuesday by a widespread outage affecting Cloudflare. Users across the globe reported difficulty accessing hundreds of popular websites and apps, including X, ChatGPT, YouTube, Spotify, on November 18.

What is Cloudflare?

The issue is connected to Cloudflare, a content delivery network (CDN) and internet security service designed to improve websites’ speed, protect them from cyber threats, and ensure uptime even during high traffic periods.

Many X users reported receiving an error message (“Something went wrong. Try reloading”) when they attempted to access their feeds, or search for content.

Not all users were affected, however. Some reported that X is working as normal, while others had intermittent access to the social network.

Ironically, Downdetector, a popular website used by many to check which websites and apps aren’t working at any given point in time, was also knocked out by the outage.

Latest Cloudflare update: “Incident now resolved”

Cloudflare acknowledged the issue by posting several updates, the most recent of which offered good news.

“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”

Full Cloudflare statement on outage

“Many of Cloudflare’s services experienced a significant outage today beginning around 11:20 UTC. It was fully resolved at 14:30 UTC. The root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.

“To be clear, there is no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity. We expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours. A detailed explanation will be posted soon on blog.cloudflare.com. Given the importance of Cloudflare’s services, any outage is unacceptable. We apologize to our customers and the Internet in general for letting you down today. We will learn from today’s incident and improve."

Second online outage in a matter of weeks

It comes only a matter of weeks after a similar outage caused by Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing division, which provides on-demand computing platforms and APIs to clients that include individuals, companies, banks, and even governments.

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