NEW DELHI: Micro-blogging platform X faced a widespread outage on Friday evening, leaving users across India and several other countries unable to access the service. The disruption, which began around prime evening hours, marks the second global outage for the platform this week and has once again raised concerns over service stability.

According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, the scale of the disruption was significant. At around 8.46 pm on Friday, more than 77,000 users worldwide had reported problems accessing X. Of these, over 6,000 reports originated from India alone, indicating that the issue was not limited to a single region but affected users across continents.

Users reported being unable to load timelines, post content, or even access the website and mobile application altogether. Many encountered error pages instead of the usual feed, prompting a surge in complaints on alternative platforms and messaging apps.

Downdetector, which monitors online service disruptions by aggregating reports from users and other data sources, showed a sharp spike in outage complaints within a short period, suggesting a sudden and widespread failure rather than a gradual degradation of service.

This was the second such disruption for X in the same week. Earlier on Tuesday, users across the globe had faced a similar outage, during which the platform remained inaccessible for a considerable period before services were gradually restored. The recurrence of outages within days has fuelled frustration among users who rely on X for real-time news, professional communication, and public discourse.

During Friday’s outage, users attempting to access X were greeted with an error message linked to Cloudflare, the content delivery network and security service used by the platform. While Cloudflare itself appeared to be functioning normally, it was reportedly unable to establish a connection with X’s servers.

The error message stated: “Cloudflare protects this website. But, something went wrong trying to reach it. If the problem isn’t resolved in the next few minutes, it’s most likely an issue with the web server you were trying to reach.” The message also described Cloudflare as a global network that secures websites and applications with a focus on speed and security.

This suggested that the problem lay not with Cloudflare’s infrastructure but with X’s own backend servers, though the company did not immediately issue an official statement explaining the cause of the outage.

As of late Friday evening, X had not publicly acknowledged the disruption or provided a timeline for restoration, a silence that further irritated users. Many took to rival platforms to express dissatisfaction and to question the reliability of the service, especially given the repeated outages in such a short span of time.

X, formerly known as Twitter, has experienced several technical issues over the past year, ranging from temporary outages to changes that have affected performance and user experience. Friday’s disruption adds to a growing list of service interruptions that have drawn scrutiny from users and technology watchers alike.

Services were gradually reported to be coming back online in some regions later in the evening, though sporadic access issues persisted for several users. It remains unclear how long the outage lasted in its entirety and whether it shared the same root cause as the disruption earlier in the week.

For now, the second outage in just a few days underscores the challenges facing the platform in maintaining consistent global uptime, particularly for a service that positions itself as a real-time digital public square.