X recovers after major outage hits users worldwide

X was largely back up after a widespread outage cut off thousands of users in the United States and abroad, disrupting a platform that now functions as a real-time channel for news, politics and customer service as much as social chatter. Downdetector data showed complaints surged past 35,000 at the peak, with the U.S., Canada and the U.K. among the hardest-hit markets.

Problems appeared around 9 a.m. Eastern time, and by 10:18 a.m. ET more than 9,800 users had reported issues. U.S. complaints later climbed to more than 25,000 before falling to about 620 as service recovered. Canada topped more than 3,400 reports at the height of the disruption, while the U.K. passed 9,000 earlier in the day. Later snapshots still showed more than 1,300 complaints in Canada and more than 1,400 in Britain, underscoring how quickly the outage spread across markets.

The pattern of complaints showed where the breakage landed most heavily. About half of the reports were tied to the app, 30% cited the feed and timeline and 15% involved the desktop website, suggesting users were blocked across the main ways they read, post and track live updates. Downdetector only flags an incident when reports are well above normal for that time of day, and it warns that user-submitted complaints may not match the exact number of affected accounts.

No cause was given for the outage, and the company did not immediately comment on what went wrong. Cloudflare said it had identified an issue and was deploying a fix around the same time complaints eased, while Reddit, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Robinhood also showed spikes that pointed to broader turbulence in internet services. For a platform used by journalists, public officials, brands and ordinary users, the episode was a reminder that a single failure can jam news flow and political messaging well beyond one app, and that the public-information system has become fragile wherever one platform dominates attention.