X Faces Second Global Outage This Week, Thousands Report Access Issues
Micro-blogging platform X experienced a widespread service disruption on Friday (January 16) evening, leaving users in India and several other countries unable to access the site. According to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, tens of thousands of users reported problems within a short span of time. By 8:46 pm IST, more than 77,000 outage complaints had been logged globally, including over 6,000 reports from India alone. Downdetector gathers such data by compiling real-time feedback submitted by users, along with other monitoring sources.
This marked the second major outage for X within the same week. A similar disruption earlier on Tuesday had affected users worldwide. During the incident, Cloudflare, the content delivery and security provider used by X, remained operational but failed to connect to the platform’s servers. Users attempting to access X were shown an error message indicating that Cloudflare was functioning correctly, but the destination web server could not be reached. The message suggested the issue was likely originating from X’s servers rather than Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
In the United States, Downdetector recorded more than 62,000 complaints by 10:22 am ET. The United Kingdom also saw a significant spike, with around 11,000 users reporting problems around 3 pm local time, which corresponded to 9 pm IST. India reported over 3,000 user complaints during the outage period. Many users reported that the platform failed to load entirely. While the app would open, it only showed a blank screen, and some browsers displayed Cloudflare error pages—typically seen during server communication failures. However, sources confirmed that the problem originated from within X’s internal systems.
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However, Downdetector noted that the actual number of affected users could be higher, as not all impacted individuals submit reports. Friday’s disruption follows another global outage on 13 January, raising concerns over the platform’s service stability.