Thousands report outages of Musk's X platform in US and UK

Elon Musk's social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced massive outages throughout Monday morning that impacted thousands of users in the US and UK.

The outage came as platform monitor Downdetector said it had seen tens of thousands of reports from US users of technical issues affecting the platform.

There were more than 8,000 outage reports from UK users shortly before 14:00 GMT, following a brief but notable surge of reports on Monday morning.

Connection issues lasted for some users into the afternoon.

Many users trying to access the platform and refresh feeds on its app and desktop site during Monday's outages were met with a loading icon.

Musk claims the outages stemmed from a "massive cyber-attack" that originated "in the Ukraine area."

But the technology billionaire, who has been a frequent critic of Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelensky, offered no evidence to support the claim and did not say whether or not he thought state actors were involved.

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

"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 said in an interview with the Fox Business channel.

Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, which monitors the connectivity of web services, said its own metrics suggested the outages could well be linked to a cyber-attack.

He said the organisation has seen several major outages spanning more than six hours on Monday, "each having 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," he added.

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to take a website offline by overwhelming it with internet traffic.

Source: BBC