On Monday evening, X (formerly Twitter) buckled under a wave of outage reports stretching from India to the United States — and the culprit wasn't the platform itself, but a lesser-known backbone provider that quietly keeps large chunks of the internet running.
Over 35,000 users reported being unable to load or refresh their X feeds on Monday morning, coinciding with a Cloudflare alert warning of "increased error rates and latency" across several of its services.
The disruption hit India particularly hard during peak usage hours — reports from Indian users climbed to roughly 1,800+ around 09:45 pm IST, with users unable to refresh timelines, run searches, or access any real-time updates.
What initially looked like an X-specific meltdown was actually a domino effect. X was not alone — Reddit, Fortnite, and Zoom users simultaneously reported outages, with Cloudflare and AWS issues flagged across the board. Reports began spiking shortly before 3 pm, and the disruption appeared global, affecting users in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Greece, and Algeria.
Cloudflare moved quickly to distance itself from the blame. A Cloudflare spokesperson told Newsweek: "Cloudflare is not currently experiencing a global outage. The only issue we're aware of is that Zayo, a network provider, is experiencing an outage on some of its network routes. That may cause some sites using Zayo exclusively to be unreachable, whether they use Cloudflare or not. We are seeing evidence that Zayo's network is recovering and expect errors to be short-lived."
Zayo is a major transit network provider — essentially one of the invisible highways that carries internet traffic between data centers and end users. When a route-level failure hits a provider like Zayo, any platform that depends on those specific network paths loses reachability, regardless of how robust its own servers are.
By late morning (US time), most affected platforms had stabilized. X's outage was resolved in approximately 45 minutes, and Cloudflare confirmed its fix was actively rolling out. The synchronized timing across multiple platforms strongly suggests shared infrastructure strain rather than separate, unrelated failures.
X has not publicly explained what happened, which has become a familiar pattern. StatusGator noted no official acknowledgment from X, despite tracking over 8,600 outage reports in the 24-hour window.
If X is still not loading for you, try switching your DNS to a public resolver like Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) or Google (8.8.8.8) — stale DNS records from your ISP can persist even after a platform recovers. Clearing the app cache or switching between mobile data and Wi-Fi can also help force a fresh connection.
The broader takeaway: when a single transit provider like Zayo hiccups, it can pull X, Reddit, and Zoom offline simultaneously — a reminder that even the world's largest platforms are only as resilient as the networks underneath them.