Thousands Report Outages of Elon Musk’s X Platform in the US and UK -X Platform
Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) experienced massive outages on Monday morning, affecting thousands of users across the United States and the United Kingdom.
According to platform monitoring service Downdetector, over tens of thousands of US users reported technical issues, while in the UK, more than 8,000 reports were registered shortly before 14:00 GMT.
What Happened?
During the outage, many users trying to access X via the mobile app and desktop site were met with a loading icon, unable to refresh their feeds. Some users continued facing connection issues well into the afternoon.
Musk Blames a ‘Massive Cyber-Attack’- X Platform
Elon Musk claimed that the outages resulted from a “massive cyber-attack” originating from the “Ukraine area”. However, he provided no evidence to support this claim and did not clarify whether he believed state actors were involved.
Speaking to Fox Business, Musk said—
“We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyber-attack to try and bring down the X system, with [Internet Protocol] addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”
Earlier, he posted on X, suggesting that either a large, coordinated group or even a nation could be behind the attack.
The BBC has approached the Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC for comment, but no official response has been reported yet. -X Platform
NetBlocks: ‘Patterns Consistent with a Cyber-Attack’
Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, an organization that monitors internet disruptions, suggested that the outage could indeed be linked to a cyber-attack.
He told the BBC—
“What we’ve been seeing is consistent with past denial-of-service attacks, rather than a configuration or coding error within the platform.”
Toker further stated that his organization had tracked several major outages spanning over six hours on Monday, each with a global impact.
“This is among the longest X/Twitter outages we’ve tracked in terms of duration, and the pattern is consistent with a large-scale denial-of-service attack targeting X’s infrastructure,” he added.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a tactic used to overwhelm a website with excessive internet traffic, causing it to go offline.
Musk has previously claimed that X has been targeted by DDoS attacks, but these claims have never been independently confirmed.
Musk Calls US Senator Mark Kelly a ‘Traitor’
On Monday, Musk also stirred controversy by calling US Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, a “traitor” after he visited Ukraine over the weekend.
Kelly had shared his thoughts on X, stating—
“The visit proved to me that we can’t give up on the Ukrainian people.”
In response, Musk labeled him a “traitor”.
Kelly then fired back, posting— X Platform
“Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do.”
