X Suffers Major Global Outage as Cloudflare Errors Block 96,000 Users
The outage began around 10:00 AM Eastern Time, affecting both web and mobile applications worldwide. Users reported that instead of their normal feeds, they were greeted with error messages stating that Cloudflare protects the website but something went wrong trying to reach the host. The disruption also impacted xAI Grok chatbot, which relies on X infrastructure.
This incident follows a pattern of recurring outages affecting the platform. On January 13, 2026, approximately 28,000 users reported similar access problems during a one-hour disruption. X also experienced significant outages on December 5 and November 18, 2025, both linked to Cloudflare technical issues. The December incident resulted from an intentional system change that caused unintended cascading failures across multiple websites.
Cloudflare status page indicated scheduled maintenance for the Toronto datacenter between 08:00 and 14:00 UTC on January 16, with traffic potentially being rerouted during the window. However, Cloudflare systems appeared to operate normally while X origin servers remained unreachable, suggesting the issue stems from X infrastructure or the connection between X and Cloudflare services.
Security experts note that repeated outages affecting major platforms highlight the critical dependencies modern web services have on content delivery networks and DDoS protection providers. Organizations relying on similar architectures should implement redundant connectivity paths and establish clear communication channels for status updates during service disruptions. Neither X nor Cloudflare has confirmed whether the outage resulted from technical failures, configuration errors, or potential security incidents.
