X is currently down for thousands of users globally, and the culprit appears to be a massive infrastructure failure at Cloudflare.
Is X (Twitter) down?
If you are frantically refreshing your “For You” feed, restarting your app, or toggling your Wi-Fi on and off hoping to see new tweets, you can stop. The problem isn’t your phone, and it isn’t actually X’s servers failing on their own.
Modern apps like X rely on Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to load images, videos, and security checks quickly. Cloudflare is the biggest of these networks.
Right now, Cloudflare is experiencing a “Global Network” issue, which acts like a blocked doorway. X’s servers might be running perfectly fine inside the building, but Cloudflare has locked the front door, preventing your phone from connecting to them.
Symptoms you might be seeing on X:
- “Cannot Retrieve Tweets” error messages.
- Infinite loading spinners on the timeline.
- Images and avatars appearing as blank gray boxes.
- Login loops or 502/504 “Bad Gateway” errors on the desktop site.
You can’t even check “Is X down?”
Normally, when X crashes, everyone rushes to Downdetector to verify the outage. But in a cruel twist of irony, Downdetector also relies on Cloudflare.
If you try to check the status of X on Downdetector right now, you will likely see this error instead of the usual charts:
Please unblock https://www.google.com/search?q=challenges.cloudflare.com to continue.
This confirms that the outage is not specific to Elon Musk’s platform but is a wider internet infrastructure collapse.
While X has not released a granular post-mortem yet, the Cloudflare Status page confirms the root cause:
- Issues escalated around 11:48 UTC on Nov 18, 2025.
- “Investigating – Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.”
- Cloudflare was performing scheduled maintenance in major hubs like Los Angeles (LAX), Chicago (ORD), and Atlanta (ATL) today. It is highly likely this maintenance triggered unexpected network congestion or failure, causing the ripple effect knocking X offline.
