Here’s why massive amount of the internet just went down

The outage affected millions of people.

Thousands of websites including Twitter, formerly known as X, suddenly went down, leaving users facing error messages across the board.

The issue appears to stem from a global network failure at Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure giant that powers a significant chunk of the online world.

In a statement, Cloudflare said: “Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating, an issue which impacts multiple customers: widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing.

"We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.”

The outage began at around 11.30am UK time, with sites crashing en masse. Some briefly flickered back online before collapsing again minutes later.

According to The Independent, even the outage-monitoring site Down Detector, which tracks website failures, was knocked out during the chaos.

When it eventually returned, it showed a sudden global spike in issues.

Cloudflare received just five problem reports at 11am but by 11.45am that number had exploded to more than 8,000.

Thousands of users also reported that X was down, alongside major platforms including OpenAI, Amazon Web Services, Facebook, and countless others.

At the time of writing, most affected sites appear to be back online, but it's not yet clear whether the outage is fully resolved.

Cloudflare says it is continuing to investigate the cause.