X mysteriously crashes, leaving millions in digital blackout—what’s really behind the outage?
Ever had one of those days where you just wanna scroll through X—yeah, the platform formerly known as Twitter—but surprise, it decides to throw a tantrum? Well, you’re not alone. Thousands of users worldwide have found themselves staring at loading icons and empty feeds since just past 1 pm on February 16. More than 10,000 people reported issues—half struggling with the app itself, others wrestling with access to the main feed or the website. Someone even quipped that “birdapp is held together with duct tape and sticks,” which, honestly, raises the question: how much chaos does it take before we finally say farewell to our trusty digital bird? It’s a head-scratcher especially since X, owned by Elon Musk, shows all systems go on its developer platform—yet, boos and complaints keep rolling in. And while last year’s massive Cloudflare outage crippled a chunk of the internet, this latest glitch remains a mystery. So grab your popcorn, because this hiccup is spreading from the UK to Canada, Australia, and beyond—and the stakes for our beloved tweeting haven couldn’t be higher. LEARN MORE
Thousands of social media users have reported being unable to access X, formerly known as Twitter.
According to Downdetector, more than 10,000 people have reported issues with the platform, with more than half citing issues with the app.
Meanwhile, one in five people reporting problems with X have said they are experiencing difficulties accessing the main feed, while 16 percent reported issues with the website.
One person reporting a problem on Downdetector commented: “birdapp is held together with duct tape and sticks, if it weren’t for the fact that so many anime artists are still here, I would’ve jumped the boat by now.”
Another added: “No notifications showing on web. Delayed replies and follows for last 72 hours.”
The issues seem to have arisen at 1.05pm this afternoon (16 February).
Thousands of people have reported issues (Anna Barclay/Getty Images)
People all over the world appear to be experiencing the same problems with X, with people in the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany and elsewhere all impacted.
Why X is down
At this stage it remains unknown why some people are struggling to access X while others can get on the app and website with no problems.
X, which is owned by billionaire mogul Elon Musk, doesn’t actually have a health status page, which makes it difficult to determine the cause of the outage.
According to the service’s developer platform for app-makers, ‘all systems are operational,’ but that isn’t stopping people from reporting the issues.
Similar outages have occurred in recent months, however none of the most recent incidents have compared to the global outage which hit X and thousands of other websites due to an issue with Cloudflare at the end of last year.
Cloudflare is a technology company used by some of the biggest websites in the world.
A huge Cloudflare outage happened last year (Cheng Xin/Getty Images)
They provide security to websites and apps, also ensuring the performance of the sites.
Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy, which essentially makes it the public face of the website.
By providing a layer of protection between the actual website’s servers and the people making requests of those servers, it gives protection from DDoS attacks and bots.
This, in theory, ensures the smooth running and performance of websites, but of course leads to catastrophe if the public face goes down.
Since this is so essential to how the websites which use it operate, Cloudflare going down will lead to numerous issues until it is fixed.
X and Elon musk are yet to comment on the current outage.
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