Over the past couple of hours, you may have been experiencing issues loading X.com or bugs when it comes to loading videos or replying to X posts. This comes off the back of over 13,500 user outage reports at the peak of a massive problem that took down large chunks of the internet.
But X itself isn't the main culprit here, Cloudflare is, and some of the website and app bugs are still persisting because of it. Let me take you through what happened.
What is Cloudflare?
Let's start from the beginning. Cloudflare is one of the biggest networks on the internet for apps and websites. Think of it like a popular, bustling store with a security guard outside that protects against cyberattacks, a traffic cop that keeps the the roads to this store running smoothly, and a range of pop-up stores closer to your customers that ensure people can get their items quicker.
It's basically the store window for a lot of key internet services like X and ChatGPT, but an "internal service degradation" took it down alongside many other systems like Shopify, Vimeo and more.
Explaining the X outage
Many people trying to visit key websites saw this error. Basically, the servers of these services were working — it was the middle-man of Cloudflare that was broken, which lead to huge widespread 500 errors and these generic errors. Even Down Detector went down in one of the more funny moments of irony.
Let's go back to the store metaphor. Let's imagine that the security guard at the door fell asleep on the job. They're unable to do their job and the queue piles up outside, as Cloudflare is unable to verify the identity of traffic entering the site.
The shop is operating just fine inside, but all the foot traffic is getting impatient and leaving.
What's the fix?
To fix this, Cloudflare is probably looking at the central communication network to resolve the issue — basically the glue that holds everything together. Think like waking that security guard up and giving him a walkie-talkie to ensure they stay awake.
Because while the issue may be this one thing, it's probably causing the ripple effect of profile pictures and videos not loading intermittently. The metaphorical store of Cloudflare has a shop window that everyone looks into to get their website content, and if one part of this shop fails, that can affect what people can see.
We don't know this specifically, as the current message on Cloudflare's status page is they are "continuing to investigate this issue," but it wouldn't surprise me if this was the case.
Keep it locked on our Cloudflare live blog for more updates on what else has been affected and updates on a fix. X.com looks like its at the very least operational again, but more are still facing issues.
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