Users across the UK and beyond were left frustrated on Tuesday, 18th November 2025, as a significant internet outage impacted some of the world's most popular online platforms.
Widespread Disruption for Major Services
The problems began at around 11am on Tuesday 18th November, according to user reports flooding into the outage tracking website, DownDetector. The service recorded a massive spike in problem reports for a host of major tech giants.
The affected companies included X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, and OpenAI. For users of X, the issues were primarily app-related, with DownDetector data showing 58% of reports concerned app problems and 32% involved the website. Many found themselves completely locked out, unable to access their accounts whether they were using a mobile app or a desktop computer.
A Familiar Problem for the Digital World
This is not the first time such a widespread outage has occurred. The incident follows a major Amazon Web Services outage in late October that took a huge number of apps and websites offline.
The root cause of that previous event was traced to an error in an update that affected the Domain Name System (DNS). The DNS acts as the internet's address book, translating user-friendly website names into the numerical IP addresses that computers need to connect. That DNS failure meant apps could not locate the correct address for DynamoDB's API, causing a cascade of failures. In total, 113 AWS services were affected during that October outage, highlighting the fragility of our interconnected digital infrastructure.
Service Restoration and Ongoing Concerns
Fortunately, the disruption on 18th November appeared to be short-lived for some services. Reports indicated that X began to operate normally again later in the day, with users gradually regaining access to their accounts.
However, this event serves as a stark reminder of how reliant modern life has become on a small number of critical cloud infrastructure providers. When one key service experiences issues, the ripple effects can be felt across the global internet, disrupting communication, business, and daily routines for millions.
