Elon Musk’s social media platform X, previously known as Twitter, faced widespread outages on Monday morning affecting numerous users in the US and UK. According to Downdetector, tens of thousands of reports of technical issues were received from US users, with over 8,000 outage reports from UK users by 14:00 GMT. Some users experienced connection problems well into the afternoon, encountering loading issues when trying to access the platform on both the app and desktop site during the outages.
Musk attributed the outages to a “massive cyber-attack” purportedly originating from the Ukraine region. However, he provided no evidence to support this claim and did not speculate on the involvement of state actors. Earlier, he suggested on X that a large coordinated group or a country may have been responsible for the attack. The Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC has been approached by the BBC for comment.
In an interview with the Fox Business channel, Musk stated, “We’re not sure exactly what happened but there was a massive cyber-attack to try and bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, indicated that the outages seemed consistent with a cyber-attack based on their monitoring data.
The prolonged outages on Monday, lasting over six hours, were seen as potentially indicative of a large-scale denial of service attack targeting X’s infrastructure. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack aims to overwhelm a website with internet traffic to take it offline. While Musk has previously claimed X has been targeted by DDoS attacks, these have not been verified.
Additionally, on Monday, Musk referred to US Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, as a “traitor” for his visit to Ukraine over the weekend. Sen Kelly responded by emphasizing the importance of defending freedom and criticized Musk’s understanding of American values. This exchange occurred on X.
