Massive Outages Disrupt Elon Musk’s X Platform in the US and UK
Elon Musk’s social media platform, X—formerly known as Twitter—faced widespread disruptions on Monday, with thousands of users in the US and UK reporting outages that lasted for hours.
According to platform monitor Downdetector, tens of thousands of users in the United States experienced technical issues, while in the UK, outage reports peaked at over 8,000 just before 14:00 GMT. Users attempting to access X during the disruptions were met with endless loading screens, unable to refresh their feeds on both the app and desktop versions of the site. Some experienced connectivity issues well into the afternoon.
Musk attributed the outages to a “massive cyber-attack” originating from “the Ukraine area,” though he provided no concrete evidence to support the claim. The billionaire suggested that either “a large, coordinated group and/or a country“ was responsible for the attack but did not specify whether he believed a state actor was involved.
Speaking to Fox Business, Musk reiterated his stance:
“We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyber-attack attempting to bring down the X system, with [Internet Protocol] addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”
Cybersecurity experts are evaluating Musk’s claim. Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, an organization that tracks global internet disruptions, told that the outage pattern resembled a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, rather than a system configuration failure or coding error.
“What we’ve been seeing is consistent with past denial-of-service attacks rather than an internal platform issue,” Toker explained.
He added that the outages, which spanned more than six hours, were among the longest ever recorded for X, with a global impact.
A DDoS attack is a cyber tactic where hackers flood a platform with excessive internet traffic, overwhelming its servers and rendering it inaccessible. While Musk has previously claimed that X has been targeted by such attacks, no independent verification has been made regarding Monday’s incident.
Adding to the controversy, Musk made headlines the same day by calling US Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, a “traitor” for visiting Ukraine over the weekend. Kelly, who had expressed his continued support for Ukraine, fired back on X:
“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.”
The reached out to the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, DC, for comment on Musk’s claims, but no response has been reported yet.
With X experiencing one of its most severe outages in recent history, questions remain about the platform’s security and whether Musk’s cyber-attack allegations hold any weight.