According to Down Detector, the problems with Elon Musk's social media platform started at around 13:30 GMT, and are affecting users globally. So far, more than 10,000 problems have been logged in the UK, while more than 42,000 have been logged over in the US. While the reason for the outage remains unclear, more than half (57 per cent) of reports have been about the X app. Meanwhile, 20 per cent of problems relate to the feed or timeline, while 17 per cent say they're struggling with the website.
Cloudflare recently published a detailed resilience initiative called Code Orange: Fail Small, outlining a comprehensive plan to prevent large-scale service disruptions after two major network outages in the past six weeks. The plan prioritizes controlled rollouts, improved failure-mode handling, and streamlined emergency procedures to make the company's global network more robust and less vulnerable to configuration errors. Cloudflare's network suffered significant outages on November 18 and December 5, 2025, with the first incident disrupting traffic delivery for about two hours and ten minutes
The core of this matter is Italy's "Piracy Shield," a law administered by Italy's telecoms regulator, the Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (AGCOM). Copyright holders can file a blocking request to AGCOM. If the regulator approves the requests, it uses an automated system to inform ISPs and other players that they must block access to certain IP addresses and not provide DNS services to domains suspected of facilitating piracy.
November 18 started like any other day. I was up early to finish some articles to meet a deadline. I was in the middle of doing so and needed some information to finish them. I figured that information would be easy and quick to get from ChatGPT so I had procrastinated doing the work. Just what I needed: when I opened ChatGPT on my laptop, I got some strange message about my credentials being invalid.
Around 10 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said it was "continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal." Other platforms that experienced outages Tuesday included the social media site X, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and the Moody's credit ratings service. Moody's website displayed an Error Code 500 and instructed individuals to visit Cloudflare's website for more information. New Jersey Transit said parts of its digital services including njtransit.com, may be temporarily unavailable or slow to load.
The outage is already being discussed on various forums. Reports are also flooding in on Downdetector. In a short period of time, 5,000 reports appeared that Cloudflare was unavailable. Because the company enables connections to countless websites, many reports of problems with sites operated by Cloudflare clients will be the result of the ongoing outage.
"The great patron of the internet for the last 27 years was Google. The great villain of the internet today is also Google," Prince said. He claimed that in the past, for every two pages that Google crawled to inform its search engine, it would, on average, send one visitor to those sites-traffic that publishers can monetise with advertising.
