Multiple social media websites are down for thousands of users, including Facebook and X, as well as music streaming app Spotify.

Several of the platforms have their servers hosted on Cloudflare, which provides tools that protect websites from cyberattacks and allow sites to load content more quickly.

It also acts as a domain name server – a directory for websites and a tool tied to mass outages in recent months.

Accessing some websites now sees users greeted by the error code 500, which points to issues with the server or the website’s code.

Issues with Cloudflare began at around 11.20am, affecting at least 11,000 people only 20 minutes later, according to outage tracker Downdetector.

The outage has eased slightly to 3,400 people at the time of writing.

Cloudflare says on its status page that engineers are investigating the issue ‘which potentially impacts multiple customers’.

‘Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available,’ it adds.

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