If you’ve been struggling to refresh your timeline or access X (formerly Twitter) this afternoon, stop toggling your flight mode on and off – it’s not your bundles.
A massive chunk of the internet went dark earlier today, Tuesday, November 18, as a major technical outage struck infrastructure giant Cloudflare. The downtime has taken down prominent platforms, with X being the biggest casualty for most users here in Kenya.
What is happening? The disruption appears to be widespread, with reports indicating that parts of the web have effectively “stopped” for users globally. The outage was first widely noted around 3:00 PM EAT (12:00 PM GMT), with confirmed server issues trickling in shortly after.
The Cloudflare Connection While most of us noticed the issue when we couldn’t load a tweet, the root cause isn’t the social media app itself. It has been identified as a failure within Cloudflare – the critical service that powers, secures, and acts as the backbone for a vast number of websites globally.
In a statement regarding the incident, Cloudflare confirmed they are “aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers.”
They haven’t given the full technical breakdown yet, but they promised details as they come. For now, the immediate impact is a “jolting” disconnection for everyone used to constant connectivity.
KOT in the Dark For the Kenyan online community, X is the town square. Thousands of users have flooded tracking sites like Down Detector to log reports that the application is unresponsive.
With X unavailable, the usual digital migration has happened: people are rushing to WhatsApp groups and Reddit threads just to confirm they aren’t the only ones seeing the “Something went wrong” error. It’s a classic “Is it just me?” moment.
Wider Implications: This incident just goes to show the fragility of the modern internet. When you rely on a few key infrastructure providers like Cloudflare, a single trip-up leads to cascading failures.
While X is the headline story, this issue is impacting “multiple customers.” This means you should expect downtime, slow loading speeds, or those annoying “checking your browser” turnstile errors on various other news sites and e-commerce platforms throughout the afternoon.
As of this update, technicians are actively working to resolve the technical problems. We will keep this page updated as services come back online.
