On January 16, X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced a widespread global outage, marking the platform’s second major disruption in a week following an earlier incident reported on 13 January. Users across multiple regions reported being unable to load the website or app, according to tracking services and media reports.
Both the website and the app failed to load for users worldwide, with many encountering blank screens. Some users also reported seeing Cloudflare error pages, although the issue was identified as originating from X itself rather than from Cloudflare’s previous technical problems.
Downdetector recorded a sharp rise in problem reports at around 8:15pm, logging 315 complaints before the number fell to 245 by 8:45pm. By 10:35am ET, more than 41,000 reports of issues had been registered in the United States. Users in the UK submitted around 8,000 reports, while more than 2,400 issues were reported in India. Downdetector noted that the figures may not reflect the total number of affected users, as reports are submitted voluntarily. X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
Internet monitoring group NetBlocks confirmed that the platform was experiencing an international outage and said the incident was not related to country-level internet restrictions or filtering. Data from Downdetector showed a substantial spike in reports around 8pm local time, indicating “possible problems” at X.
Cloudflare said at 9:21pm that it had identified an issue with Magic Network Monitoring Data, which could result in customers seeing empty or blank data on dashboards. The company said it was working to mitigate the problem. Earlier, at around 8pm, Cloudflare had reported that scheduled maintenance was under way and that traffic might be rerouted, potentially causing slight increases in latency for users.
The disruption followed a similar outage earlier in the week. On 13 January, thousands of users worldwide reported difficulties accessing X, with Downdetector showing reports in the United States peaking at more than 28,300 before falling to around 700. In the UK, reports declined from over 8,000 to roughly 130, while in Canada complaints eased after surpassing 3,200. In Pakistan, reports peaked at 93 before dropping to four.
Previous incidents include a Cloudflare outage in November 2025 that briefly prevented access to X after a faulty security configuration disrupted traffic. A separate disruption days later took the platform offline for thousands of users in the United States. On 10 March last year, users in Pakistan and elsewhere around the world experienced an outage that platform owner Elon Musk said was caused by a cyberattack.
