Thousands of Experience Outages on Musk's X Platform in the US & UK

Elon Musk's social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced widespread disruptions on Monday morning, affecting thousands of users in the United States and the United Kingdom.

 

The outage occurred as platform monitor Downdetector reported tens of thousands of reports of technical issues with the site from US users.

 

MOver8,000 outage reports were received from UK customers before 14:00 GMT, following a small but significant spike in incidents on Monday morning.

 

Some customers continued to have connection troubles into the afternoon.

 

During Monday's disruptions, many users who attempted to access the platform and refresh feeds on its app and desktop site faced a loading indicator. 

Musk claimed the disruptions were caused by a "massive cyber-attack" that began "in the Ukraine area."

However, the technology mogul, who has frequently criticized Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelensky, provided no evidence to support his assertion and declined to clarify whether he believed state agents were involved.

 

Previously, he stated on X that "either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved."

 

The BBC has contacted the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, DC, for comment.

"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," Musk stated in an interview with Fox Business.

 

Alp Toker, head of Netblocks, monitors web service connection, said a cyber-attack likely caused the failures.

 

"What we've been seeing is consistent with what we've seen in past denial of service attacks, rather than a configuration or coding error in the platform," according to the BBC's report.

He stated that the organization experienced significant disruptions lasting more than six hours on Monday, with "each having a global impact."

 

"This is amongst the longest X/Twitter outages we've tracked in terms of duration, and the pattern is consistent with a denial of service attack targeting X's infrastructure at scale," a spokesperson said.

 

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack attempts to bring a website down by overwhelming it with internet traffic.

 

Mr Musk has previously alleged that the platform has been subjected to DDoS attacks, but this has not been substantiated.

On Monday, Musk also dubbed Arizona Democrat Senator Mark Kelly a "traitor" for visiting Ukraine over the weekend.  Sean Kelly said the visit "proved to me that we can't give up on the Ukrainian people."

 

Sen. Kelly responded: "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 exchange took occurred on X.