As of Tuesday, February 17, 2026, Downdetector is reporting a series of significant service disruptions affecting major digital platforms, including Xbox Live and Anthropic’s AI assistant, Claude. These incidents follow a massive global outage that sidelined Elon Musk’s social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), just 24 hours ago.
Xbox Live and Claude Face Fresh Disruptions
On Tuesday morning, Downdetector recorded a sharp spike in reports for Xbox Live. More than 5,000 users reported issues with the gaming service, citing problems with server connections and online matchmaking. Simultaneously, Claude, the AI assistant developed by Anthropic, saw a surge in outage reports as users experienced failures with the chat function and API responsiveness.
X Recovers After Massive Presidents’ Day Outage
The current disruptions come on the heels of a major global event on Monday, February 16. During the Presidents’ Day holiday in the United States, X suffered a widespread outage that affected over 40,000 users at its peak. According to Downdetector data, the issues began around 8:00 a.m. ET, with 56% of reports originating from app users and 33% from the website.
While service for X was largely restored by 10:00 a.m. ET on Monday, the platform experienced a second, smaller wave of glitches later in the day. Users in the U.S., UK, and India were among the most heavily impacted by the “meltdown,” which left many unable to load their feeds or post updates.
How Downdetector Tracks Real-Time Issues
Downdetector has become the essential “early warning system” for the modern internet. The platform utilizes a community-driven methodology to identify service failures, often before companies acknowledge them internally. Key features of the service include:
- Crowdsourced Reporting: Analyzing thousands of individual user reports to identify patterns.
- Social Media Monitoring: Tracking “problem indicators” across the web to confirm outages.
- Visual Maps: Providing real-time heatmaps to show where outages are most concentrated geographically.
- Serverless Architecture: Built on AWS multi-region serverless principles, Downdetector itself is designed for high resilience to handle massive traffic spikes during major internet collapses.
What to Do During a Service Outage
If Downdetector indicates a spike for a service you use, experts recommend the following steps before assuming your hardware is at fault:
- Check the Map: Verify if the outage is local or global on the Downdetector heatmap.
- Verify Other Devices: Test the service on a different device or network (e.g., switch from Wi-Fi to cellular data).
- Wait for Baseline Levels: Monitor the report graph; once reports return to “baseline” levels, the service is typically stable.
- Restart Hardware: If the service is reported as “Up” but you still face issues, restart your router or modem.
As digital infrastructure becomes increasingly complex, tools like Downdetector remain vital for transparency, especially as recent events with Cloudflare and AWS demonstrate how single points of failure can disrupt millions of users simultaneously.