It's not just you. X and vast tracts of the internet are down.



Large sections of the internet stopped working on Tuesday morning. Among the sites affected by the latest in a weeks-long series of outages were Amazon Web Services, X, League of Legends, the betting site bet365, Spotify, ChatGPT, and — ironically — the website that monitors online outages, Downdetector.

The problem appears to be the result of issues at Cloudflare, a San Francisco-headquartered tech company that effectively serves as a backbone to a myriad of sites, providing content delivery network and wide area network services, domain registration, and cybersecurity.

'We saw a spike in unusual traffic.'

At the time of writing, the Cloudflare system status page indicated that the company was working toward restoring global network services, having hours earlier acknowledged "experiencing an internal service degradation" that could leave some services "intermittently impacted."

The latest outages come just days after Cloudflare admitted an "issue which potentially impacts multiple customers" — an issue that was supposedly "resolved."

A spokesperson for Cloudflare said in a statement obtained by the Guardian, "We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20am [London time]. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors. While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services."

"We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic," continued the spokesperson. "We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic."

The company's engineers were reportedly scheduled to conduct some maintenance work on data centers in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Tahiti, and Santiago, Chile. It's unclear whether their efforts had anything to do with the technical issues.

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Bluesky founder reboots Vine for AI-free social media — as human-only video becomes 'nostalgic'



Jack Dorsey is bringing the nostalgia back, just a few seconds at a time.

Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2007 and served as its inaugural CEO for a year until returning to the position for a six-year stint in its seemingly darkest years between 2015 and 2021.

Now, through his nonprofit called and Other Stuff, Dorsey is bringing one of the internet's most beloved applications back from the dead.

'Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things ...'

"So basically, I'm like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?" said Evan Henshaw-Plath, Dorsey's pick to spearhead the revival. The New Zealander comes from Dorsey's nonprofit team, where he is known as Rabble, and has outlined aspirations to bring the internet vibe back to its Web 2.0 time period — roughly 2004-2010 or thereabouts.

Dorsey and Henshaw-Plath are rebooting Vine, the six-second video app that predominantly served viewers short, user-generated comedy clips. The format is a clear inspiration for modern apps like TikTok and formats like YouTube's Shorts and Instagram's Reels.

Dorsey and company are focused on keeping the nostalgic feel, however, and unlike the other apps, will keep a six-second time limit while also taking a stance on content. What that means, according to Yahoo, is that the platform will reject AI-generated videos using special filters meant to prevent them from being posted.

RELATED: Social media matrix destroys free will; Dorsey admits ‘we are being programmed’

i loved vine. i found it pre-launch, pushed the company to buy it (i wasn’t ceo at the time), and they did great. but over time https://t.co/HNsCMGtS04 (tiktok) took off, and and the founders left, leaving vine directionless. when i came back as ceo we decided to shut it down…
— jack (@jack) April 11, 2024

The new app, called diVine, will revive 10,000 archived Vine posts, after the new team was able to extract a "good percentage" of some of the most popular videos.

Former Vine users are able to claim their old videos, so long as they can prove access to previously connected social media accounts that were on their former Vine profiles. Alternatively, the users can request that their old videos be taken down.

"The reason I funded the nonprofit and Other Stuff is to allow creative engineers like Rabble to show what's possible in this new world," Dorsey said, per Yahoo.

This will be done by "using permissionless protocols which can't be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner," he added.

Henshaw-Plath commented on returning to simpler internet times — as silly as it sounds — when a person's content feed only consisted of accounts he follows, with real, user-generated content.

"Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or you could choose who you follow, and it's just your feed, and where you know that it's a real person that recorded the video?" he asked.

RELATED: Twitter announces the demise of video-sharing app Vine, internet weeps (2016)

According to Tech Crunch, Vine was acquired by Twitter in 2012 for $30 million before eventually shutting down in 2016.

The app sparked careers for personalities like Logan Paul, Andrew “King Bach” Bachelor, and John Richard Whitfield, aka DC Young Fly. Bachelor and Whitfield captured the genre that was most popular on the platform: eccentric young performers who published unique comedy.

DiVine is currently in a beta stage and is available only to existing users of the messenger app Nostr.

X owner Elon Musk announced in August that he was trying acquire access to Vine's archive so that users could post the videos on his platform.

"We recently found the Vine video archive (thought it had been deleted) and are working on restoring user access, so you can post them if you want," Musk wrote.

However, it seems the billionaire may have been beaten to the punch by longtime rival Dorsey.

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Threads is now bigger than X, and that’s terrible for free speech



Move over X! The public square has a new mayor. The latest user metrics show that, for the first time ever, Threads surpassed X in monthly active users worldwide, and it’s on track to rise even further. At the same time, X continues to decline, spelling disaster for the world's free-speech platform. Will censorship run rampant on the global stage, or is there still hope that X can bounce back? Let’s find out ...

Threads has more daily users than X, but it’s not what you think

In a graph compiled by Similarweb, September shows that Threads just barely eked ahead of X in monthly active users, coming in at 130.2 million daily users compared to X’s 130.1 million users. The difference between them is razor-thin, but it’s still significant for one big reason: September 2025 marks the very first time that Threads surpassed X since the platform launched on July 5, 2023.

Graphic by Zach Laidlaw

Another quick look at the graph outlines a second alarming stat — X, marked in orange, is on a clear downward slide, while Threads, highlighted in blue, is climbing upward. Now that both have intersected, it’s likely that they will trade places permanently, giving Threads the crown over X in active monthly users worldwide.

Threads stands to gain it all and shift the political narrative back in favor of the left.

But it’s not all bad news. Threads may be king around the globe, but X still leads on mobile in the U.S. market with 21.3 million daily users over Threads’ 16.2 million daily active mobile users. The disparity is even larger for website visits, with 140.7 million daily active users flocking to X.com versus a paltry 7.7 million daily users on Threads.com.

So why worry if X is still ahead of Threads in the United States? There are several causes for concern:

The great social media reset

Now that Threads is the new worldwide digital town square, it’s only a matter of time until the U.S. market takes a hit. The first major paradigm shift will come from brands as they pull advertising dollars from X and invest in Threads with its wider global reach. Advertisers have already dropped X in the past, and Elon Musk sued to reverse it, though there may not be much he can do if brands simply decide to prioritize a more active platform.

Next, users will continue to drop off in favor of Threads’ growing community. They’ll follow their friends and relatives to Meta’s platform, further hitting X’s bottom line. If X loses enough traction after that, it will either recede into obscurity or worse, it could dissolve entirely.

The end of online free speech

As a bastion of free speech, X is the premiere open platform with the least amount of political censorship. While Americans can exercise these rights on X, the rise of Threads opens the door for greater censorship around the world, especially in countries where X is already banned.

If X topples entirely, no U.S. citizen is safe from the next Democrat president reinstating the oppressive censorship tactics from the Biden administration. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg claims to be a proponent of free speech these days, but does anyone trust him to keep his word in the next administration? I’m not holding my breath.

The echo chamber wars

Just as pre-Musk Twitter was a left-leaning echo chamber for liberal ideas, X could become the same thing for the right. More left-leaning users will undoubtedly flee to Threads to shore up their online political stronghold, and X will morph into a right-wing haven primarily for conservative values.

It might sound like a good idea to give both sides their places to gather online in peace, but the truth is a little more grim. Echo chambers of any kind have consequences, and society is better off without them. We need an online space — like X — where the two sides engage in civil debate, a fact that the late Charlie Kirk knew well. In Charlie’s own words, “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence ... because you start to think the other side is so evil and they lose their humanity.”

X is more than its user metrics

Looking at raw data, the graph is clear: X has been on a steady decline for years dating back to Elon Musk’s acquisition. At the same time, Threads has continued to grow month over month, and it doesn’t show any signs of stopping. If the trend plays out, X is at real risk of losing its power in the social and political landscape, while Threads stands to gain it all and shift the political narrative back in favor of the left.

RELATED: Zuckerberg's vision: US military AI and tech around the world

Photo by Alex Wong / Contributor via Getty Images

That said, X’s U.S. momentum is still going strong, providing enough engagement to keep the platform relevant, at least for the time being. X is also so much more than a social media app — it’s a hub for xAI and Grok, a PR machine for SpaceX, a launchpad for the new Vine, a budding financial platform, and more. Musk is betting big on X as a holistic lifestyle product that transcends its social roots. The new strategy provides multiple engagement points to grow the userbase outside of X alone, keep users locked in every day, and make sure they come back for more, Threads be damned.

CRASH: Amazon Web Services outage cripples apps, megacorps, and doorbells, shocking a fragile America



An outage on Amazon's web hosting service caused a sweep of app outages after the company faced issues at an east-coast operations center.

AWS hosts about 6.3% of all websites, but some of the biggest brands' communications platforms also rely on the service.

'I don't trust Signal anymore.'

When reports started rolling in around 3 a.m. Eastern Time, Amazon said it was dealing with an "operational issue" that was affecting 14 services at its northern Virginia center.

Snapchat, McDonald's, and even Ring doorbell cameras were among some of the applications affected. Even gaming platforms like Roblox and Fortnite were affected, as were messaging and communications programs like Zoom and Signal.

According to NBC News, about 6.5 million reports piled up that said over 1,000 sites and services had gone offline.

After 6:30 a.m., AWS said it had "fully mitigated" the issues; that was until 10:14 a.m., when it confirmed "significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region."

The widespread outage sparked conversations about the fragility and dependency of major companies and even institutions, as the blackout affected the U.K. government's HM Revenue and Customs department, which handles tax services.

With Signal affected, purporting to be an encrypted chat, X owner Elon Musk jumped on the opportunity to cast doubt on the app and direct readers to his own version, X chat.

RELATED: Amazon invests $500M in mini nuclear reactors to power AI operations


The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange “AWS dependencies” such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head.

You can also do file transfers and audio/video calls. https://t.co/l0GIIZYz6y
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 20, 2025

"I don't trust Signal anymore," Musk wrote on X, responding to a user alarmed that Signal was not working.

Just over 20 minutes later, Musk started promoting his own messenger: "The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange 'AWS dependencies' such that I can't read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head."

This is a contrast from May 2024, when Musk openly praised AWS for developing generative AI that helps write website code.

"Impressive. My hat is off to what Amazon has accomplished with AWS," Musk wrote at the time.

RELATED: AI isn’t feeding you

— (@)

This is not the first time Signal has been accused of being insecure. In a 2023 interview with the popular online influencer group Nelk Boys, conservative host Tucker Carlson claimed the NSA had hacked his Signal account around the time he was attempting to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Carlson said he got a call from someone in Washington, D.C., who sat down with him and had knowledge of his conversations about planning an interview with Putin because the NSA had allegedly read Carlson's messages.

An NGO called Article 19, which describes itself as a group "defending freedom of expression and information around the world," told NBC News that the organization felt the disruptions were "democratic failures."

"When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it — media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop functioning, and the infrastructure that serves our digital society crumbles."

According to Wojciech Gawroński, who runs the website AWS Maniac, Amazon has suffered one to two major outages per year between 2011 and 2021.

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YouTube bans Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes AGAIN immediately after saying it would support 'free expression'



Less than two days after YouTube was alleged to be giving banned creators a second chance, the platform has reportedly banned controversial commentators Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones.

The news comes after Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) made announcements about how Google, parent of YouTube, was prepared to make a series of policy changes after admitting to the fact that "White House pressure" during the Biden administration led to censorship of "political debate on COVID and elections."

'To clarify, we terminated this channel as it's still against our rules for previously terminated users to start a new channel ...'

Rep. Jordan wrote on X, "Due to our oversight efforts, GOOGLE commits to offer ALL creators previously kicked off YouTube due to political speech violations to return to the platform."

Testing out the new alleged commitments, both Alex Jones' Infowars platform and Fuentes reportedly started new YouTube channels. According to Infowars, it started a channel called AlexJonesLive, while Fuentes reportedly started RealNickFuentes.

On Thursday morning, Infowars said its channel had been removed, while AF Post, along with some Fuentes supporters, said his page was taken down by YouTube as well.

It was not long before YouTube responded to both claims directly and revealed that the pages were not taken down by mistake.

RELATED: Google admits to political censorship under Biden and says thousands of YouTube accounts will be reinstated

— (@)

Replying to Infowars, YouTube said, "To clarify, we terminated this channel as it's still against our rules for previously terminated users to start a new channel — the pilot program for terminations isn't available yet and will be a limited pilot program to start."

The platform added, "We'll have more to share on how the pilot program will work, who is eligible, and how creators can access it very soon."

In response to the report by AF Post, YouTube similarly wrote that the company "terminated these channels as it's still against our rules for previously terminated users to start new channels."

On its own X page, YouTube explained again that the pilot program is not yet live and that it will continue to terminate "new channels from previously terminated users in accordance with these guidelines."

RELATED: War Department contractor warns China is way ahead, and 'we don't know how they're doing it'

— (@)

A spokesman for Rep. Jordan told Blaze News that the new YouTube program will only "extend at a minimum to any users banned for policies no longer in effect."

The spokesman added, "The policies that have been rolled back the most were the COVID-19 and elections policies. This will include thousands of Americans and likely disproportionately conservatives. Others may be welcomed back onto the platform as well."

Jordan's office explained that, as they understand it, YouTube meant that the "limited" portion of the program referred to only users who were banned for policies that were no longer in effect. Still, Jordan's team referred to this as a "massive change," stating they believe it to be the first time YouTube has made a policy shift in this manner.

"But the main fact remains unchanged," the spokesman continued. "ANY account banned for policies no longer in effect WILL be allowed back onto the platform."

Blaze News asked Rep. Jordan's team if they know when the expected pilot program is set to begin; his team said they did not, but that they "expect a much larger announcement in the coming days from YouTube and that people will start returning to the platform soon."

"Our understanding is that YouTube is referring to it as a pilot program because it is a new step YouTube has not taken before, and there may be issues to work through with the rollout," the spokesman added.

— (@)

Fuentes spoke on his channel's deletion his X page on Thursday, noting YouTube's comment about reinstating "channels they approve under a 'limited pilot program.'"

"Sounds a little ridiculous. Can't we just have free speech?" he asked. "I've been banned since February 2020 when I was 21 years old."

He continued on his show, "America First," and revealed it was Jones' idea to do a "stress test" on YouTube by creating new accounts.

"It didn't last even 12 hours," he explained. "YouTube should have free speech; you said you have a renewed commitment to free speech. But you're still banning people?"

Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, said that while he thinks Fuentes may not like him, he still finds it "un-American" for his channel to be removed.

"Our country is at its best when we're able to hear one another," Ramaswamy wrote on X. "Nick Fuentes & Jimmy Kimmel probably don't like me, for different reasons. I don't care. It's still un-American to muzzle the peaceful expression of opinions. And no, that's not a legal point, it's a cultural point."

YouTube did not respond to Blaze News' questions about its pilot program.

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Keith Olbermann Offers ‘Delayed’ Apology For Posting Online Threats Against Scott Jennings

'They could be misinterpreted'

AI chatbots share blame for confusion in wake of Charlie Kirk shooting



Confusion and conspiracy theories abounded in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk last Wednesday. While people attempted to sift through the information they glimpsed in the fog of the aftermath, several prominent AI chatbots may have hindered more than they helped in the pursuit of truth.

A CBS News report revealed several serious issues with multiple chatbots' handling of the facts in the aftermath of Kirk's death and the ensuing manhunt for the alleged shooter.

'It's not based on fact-checking. It's not based on any kind of reportage on the scene.'

The report highlighted several factual inaccuracies stemming from xAI's Grok, search engine Perplexity's AI, and Google's AI overview in the hours and days after the tragedy.

RELATED: Therapists are getting caught using AI on their patients

Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images

One of the most important instances came when an X account with 2.3 million followers shared an AI-enhanced photo turned video of the suspect. The AI enhancement smoothed the suspect's features and distorted his clothing considerably. Although the post was flagged by a community note warning that this was not a reliable way to identify a suspect, the post was shared thousands of times and was even reposted by the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Utah before it issued a correction.

Other false reports from Grok include labeling the FBI's reward offer a "hoax" and, according to CBS News, statements that reports concerning Charlie Kirk's condition "remained conflicting" even after the official report of his death was released.

S. Shyam Sundar, a professor at Penn State University and the director of the university's Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence, told CBS News that AI chatbots produce responses based on probability, which may often lead to inaccurate information in unfolding events.

"They look at what is the most likely next word or next passage," Sundar said. "It's not based on fact-checking. It's not based on any kind of reportage on the scene. It's more based on the likelihood of this event occurring, and if there's enough out there that might question his death, it might pick up on some of that."

Artificial intelligence's sycophantic tendencies may also be to blame, as the third episode of "South Park's" latest season recently highlighted.

Grok, for example, gave a highly flawed response on Friday morning to one user indicating that Tyler Robinson, 22, was opposed to MAGA while his father was a supporter of the movement. In a follow-up question, the user suggested that Robinson's "social media posts" indicated that he may be a MAGA supporter, and Grok quickly changed its tune in its response: "Reports indicate Tyler Robinson is a registered Republican who donated to Trump in 2024. Social media photos show him in a Trump costume for Halloween, and his family appears to support MAGA."

A Grok post timestamped roughly an hour later on Friday denied that he had any known political affiliation, thus showing a discrepancy in responses between users of the same chatbot.

The other AIs fared no better. Perplexity appears to have labeled reports about Kirk's death a "hypothetical scenario" several hours after he was confirmed deceased. According to CBS News, "Google's AI Overview for a search late Thursday evening for Hunter Kozak, the last person to ask Kirk a question before he was killed, incorrectly identified him as the person of interest the FBI was looking for."

While artificial intelligence may be useful for aggregating resources for research, people are realizing that these chatbots are highly flawed when it comes to real-time reporting and separating the wheat from the chaff.

X did not respond to Return's request for comment.

After His Murder, New York Times Assassinates Charlie Kirk’s Character

After Charlie Kirk was murdered, allegedly by a shooter who accused him of 'spreading hate,' the NYT falsely accused Kirk of making antisemitic statements.

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The Walt Disney Company and Lucasfilm announced Thursday that they have settled with actress Gina Carano in a lawsuit she filed against the entertainment giants last year for alleged wrongful termination. “We have reached an agreement with Gina Carano to resolve the issues in her pending lawsuit against the companies,” a Lucasfilm representative said in a statement. […]