‘X is Down’: Global Outage Shuts Off Twitter Successor — Live Updates, Causes & When Service Will Return

Update 18 Nov 2025—why X is down again today For the fourth time since March, users across the United States and Europe woke up to a blank feed on X (formerly Twitter). Beginning at 6:07 a.m. ET, Downdetector reports spiked from the normal baseline of a few dozen complaints to more than 38 000 within minutes, confirming a fresh “X down” incident. What’s broken • Home timeline and search fail to load in the mobile apps and on X.com • New posts hang on “Sending…” before timing out • Third-party embed widgets are returning 503 errors on news sites and ecommerce checkouts Who is affected Heat-map data shows the outage hitting New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London and Berlin hardest, but reports stretch from São Paulo to Sydney, indicating a global disruption. Suspected cause X owner Elon Musk blamed the March outage on a “massive cyberattack” that he said involved “a large, coordinated group and/or a country”. Cyber-forensics firm NetBlocks notes the signature today looks identical: a distributed-denial-of-service flood aimed at X’s edge servers, overwhelming traffic flows on ports 80 and 443. No threat group has claimed responsibility this time, but the pro-Palestinian hacktivist collective Dark Storm said it launched March’s attack; analysts caution that any actor could spoof that claim. Why this keeps happening 1. Staff cuts: Musk trimmed the back-end engineering team by 80 % after his 2022 buyout, leaving roughly 550 full-time engineers to manage a platform that once required 2 800 just on reliability. 2. Architecture drift: Rapid re-platforming to in-house Grok AI features has introduced untested code paths, according to two former site-reliability engineers who spoke to CNBC on background. 3. Higher attack surface: X dropped Cloudflare’s enterprise DDoS shield in January to cut costs, only to re-enable it during the March incident. Industry trackers show the waiver lapsed again on 1 Nov, leaving the platform exposed. Business fallout • Ad-tech dashboard Improvado estimates $3.1 million in advertising impressions lost per hour of downtime. • Tesla shares—often sensitive to Musk-related headlines—fell another 2.3 % in pre-market trading as traders saw parallels with the March chaos. • Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads all reported sign-up surges exceeding 400 % versus yesterday, suggesting users are shopping for permanent alternatives. What to do while X is down • Verify service status at status.x.com and Downdetector before clearing cache or reinstalling the app. • Switch to SMS-fallback for two-factor authentication codes; platform engineers warn that delayed token delivery is common during partial outages. • Follow @NetBlocks, @CloudflareRadar and @USCERTgov on rival networks for live mitigation updates. When will X be back? During the March 10 meltdown, three outage waves lasted 45, 60 and 280 minutes respectively before traffic normalized. If today’s pattern matches, expect intermittent access through late morning ET. A full restore typically coincides with X re-enabling Cloudflare “I’m Under Attack” mode, visible when the site shows a five-second browser check. Bottom line Searches for “X down,” “Twitter outage today” and “why is X not working” are spiking again as the platform faces its most frequent reliability crisis since the 2022 acquisition. Unless the company invests in hardened edge infrastructure and larger on-call teams, analysts warn users should brace for more blank feeds—and advertisers should budget for more blackouts—in the months ahead.