Daniel Otera
Users of the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, and services reliant on internet giant Cloudflare were thrown into disarray on Tuesday as a significant outage crippled access across the globe, including in Nigeria.
The disruptions began in the afternoon, with outage tracking website Downdetector.com recording a massive, sudden spike in problem reports for X starting around 4:36 pm IST. Thousands of users from the United States to India and Nigeria found themselves unable to load their timelines, publish new posts, or access core features of the platform.
The failure appeared to be comprehensive, affecting both the X mobile application and its desktop website, leaving many users staring at error messages and unable to refresh their feeds.
“I was in the middle of a crucial business thread when the app just froze. I thought it was my network, but I tried on Wi-Fi and my data, and it was the same story,” said Tunde Alabi, a digital marketer based in Lagos. “It’s a stark reminder of how reliant we’ve become on these platforms.”
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Compounding the digital chaos, Cloudflare, a critical internet infrastructure company that provides security and performance services for a vast array of websites, also reported severe issues. The company acknowledged the problem on its official status page, stating it had launched an investigation.
The simultaneous nature of the outages immediately sparked concerns about a potential connection and the cascading effect on the wider internet ecosystem. Many online services that depend on Cloudflare’s network to function experienced slowdowns or became entirely unreachable.
In an initial update, Cloudflare stated, “We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.”
As of press time, X had not issued any official statement clarifying the root cause of the downtime or the number of users affected. The silence from the Elon Musk-owned company left many to speculate on social media platforms that remained accessible.
This is not the first time such widespread disruptions have occurred. In May of this year, The Journal gathered that X users were locked out by a similar outage. Furthermore, a major incident in October, stemming from a technical failure at Amazon Web Services, temporarily knocked out hundreds of major platforms like Disney+, Snapchat, and several airline and banking services, highlighting the fragility of the modern, interconnected internet.
For millions of Nigerians and users worldwide, the event served as an unscheduled and frustrating digital recess, forcing a temporary return to a world less connected.