X and more apps hit by internet outage

A number of websites, including social media platform X, appear to have been hit by problems affecting internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare.

Thousands of users reported issues with X and other services to outage monitoring site Downdetector flagged shortly after 11:30 GMT on Tuesday.

“Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers,” the company said in a note on its service status dashboard at 11:48 UTC.

“Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.”

The company said in further updates, shortly after 12:00 GMT, it was continuing to investigate the issue.

It comes after an outage impacting Amazon Web Services last month saw more than 1,000 sites and apps knocked offline.

Another major web services provider, Microsoft Azure, was also affected shortly afterwards.

Some experts suggest such incidents highlight the fragility of the modern internet, and the profound disruption that can be caused by problems at the small number of companies underpinning it.