If you tried logging onto X.com (previously known as Twitter) this morning, you were probably met with this message: “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.” Up until now, most online users hadn’t even heard of Cloudflare, but its widespread outage on Tuesday, November 18, caused a system meltdown. So, quite a few questions hang in the air as we wait for updates: Is X still down? What is Cloudflare? What other online platforms have been impacted today?
The Cloudflare outage comes weeks after the worldwide Amazon Web Services (AWS) debacle, which caused a mass internet outage in October, affecting banks, airlines and other essential businesses for a day.
Below, get updates on the Cloudflare outage.
What Is Cloudflare?
Like Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare is an internet content delivery network that typically operates in the background, only becoming visible when something goes wrong. The American company is based in San Francisco, California.
What Does the Cloudflare Outage Affect?
As X users are seeing, it looks like Cloudflare directly impacts the social media platform owned by Elon Musk. Previously known as Twitter, X.com went down in the morning hours on Tuesday, November 18, with one message appearing on screen that read, “Something went wrong. Try reloading.”
However, multiple other platforms were also hit by the Cloudflare outage, including Canva.com. While trying to load the graphic design website, users encountered a notification that read, “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
Is X Still Down? Twitter Outage Update
At the time of publication, yes, X.com — formerly Twitter — is still down, and Musk has not provided a public update on the system shutdown.
As seen on Downdetector.com, thousands of X.com users complained they still could not load their accounts by 8:00 a.m. ET. At around 6:00 a.m. ET, more than 11,000 Twitter users reported errors loading their accounts.
Is Cloudflare Back Up?
No, Cloudflare has not been fully restored by the time of publication.
Why Did Cloudflare Go Down? Outage Explained
According to Cloudflare’s status page, the company had a “scheduled maintenance” message for Atlanta International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport.
At around 13:30 UTC (8:30 a.m. ET), Cloudflare announced it was “experiencing an internal service degradation” and acknowledged that “some services may be intermittently impacted.”
“We are focused on restoring service,” the company explained in its statement. “We will update as we are able to remediate. More updates to follow shortly.”
