X (formerly Twitter), Zoom, Reddit, Teams all go down at once: Reason revealed

X (formerly Twitter), Zoom, Reddit, and Microsoft Teams suffered a major outage on Monday morning, June 22.

The outage left thousands of users unable to access their social media platforms and workplace communication tools.

Users began reporting the disruption shortly after 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time, with multiple reports on Downdetector. While X felt the brunt of the problem with about 36,000 reports of problems occurring between 9:45 am and 10 am, it wasn’t alone.

There were 2,864 complaints on Reddit, 3,245 complaints on Zoom, 1,312 on Microsoft Teams, and even 1,422 on the stock trading app Robinhood.

The major reason behind the outage is Cloudflare disruptions. Around 9:30 a.m., Cloudflare acknowledged the outage, citing “increased error rates and latency in multiple services.” The company identified the issue and deployed a fix shortly after 9:30 a.m. by 10:26 a.m. reports of X outages raised to 2,079, with other platforms following suit.

Services were back to normal after an hour, but this outage has demonstrated just how dependent today’s internet infrastructure is on third-party suppliers such as Cloudflare and how a simple error can topple many platforms at once.