NEW DELHI, January 17 — Micro-blogging platform X experienced a widespread service disruption on Friday evening, leaving users in India and several other countries unable to access the site. This marks the second major global outage for the social media platform within the same week.
According to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, tens of thousands of users reported problems within a short span of time. By 8:46 pm Indian Standard Time (IST), more than 77,000 outage complaints had been logged globally.
What happened during the X outage?
Users attempting to access X, either via its app or website, encountered blank screens or error messages. The app would open but fail to load content. On browsers, many users saw a Cloudflare error page.
Cloudflare is a content delivery and security provider used by X. Its error message indicated that its service was operational, but it could not reach X’s web servers. This indicated that X’s internal systems were the source of the issue.
Where were users affected?
The outage had a global impact, with significant user reports from several countries.
United States: Over 62,000 complaints by 10:22 am Eastern Time.
United Kingdom: 11,000 reports at 3 p.m. local time.
India: Over 6,000 user complaints were filed during the outage period.
Downdetector said the real number of affected users was likely higher, since the data only reflects reports submitted by users.
Why does this outage matter?
This disruption, which began on Friday evening in India, is the second of its kind in just four days. The platform faced a similar global outage on Tuesday, January 13. Users and experts are worried about the platform’s service stability and reliability following the back-to-back incidents.
FAQ
Q: What time did the X outage happen in India?
A: By 8:46 p.m. IST on Friday, more than 6,000 complaints from Indian users had been reported.
Q: Was the problem with Cloudflare or X?
A: Cloudflare’s message pointed to a problem with X’s servers rather than Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
Q: Was this the first outage this week?
A: No. X experienced a similar global service disruption on Tuesday, January 13.
