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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- X experienced a widespread outage Friday morning.
- Problems started shortly before 10:30 a.m. ET.
- The site was functional again, a little more than an hour later.
If you had problems with X Friday, you weren’t alone.
After reports of problems surged on Downdetector, X appears to be operating normally again, as of 11:45 a.m. ET.
The trouble started shortly before 10:30 a.m. ET. When I tried for myself on the browser version, I got an error saying, “Connection timed out Error code 522.” The app version loaded, but no new content would load. By 11:10 a.m. ET, the site would load, but I got an error message that read, “Oops, something went wrong. Please try again later” when I tried to log in.
A Downdetector map showed problems all across the United States — more than 180,000. This comes just a few days after another outage that took the social media site offline for many. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as ZDNET.)
Downdetector also showed a surge in reports of a Cloudflare outage at the same time, along with Grok, but the issue did appear to be mostly limited to X. A Cloudflare representative confirmed in a statement to ZDNET that “Cloudflare services are operating normally” and the issues weren’t related to Cloudflare.
While today’s incident isn’t linked, in November, a massive outage took down huge portions of the web. Last year’s attack wasn’t malicious, and there’s nothing yet to indicate this was, either.
The specific error page many users saw was a Cloudflare error page, but it said that Cloudflare is working normally and the problem is with the host — in this case, x.com.
I’ve reached out to X for more details.
Correction: Jan. 16: This story incorrectly included AWS among the sites experiencing outages on Friday.
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