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

X Faces Major Outages Amid Claims of Cyber-Attack

Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter, suffered widespread outages throughout Monday morning, affecting thousands of users in the US and UK.

According to Downdetector, tens of thousands of US users reported technical issues, while UK outage reports peaked at over 8,000 shortly before 14:00 GMT. Some users continued to experience connection problems well into the afternoon, with many encountering a loading icon while trying to refresh feeds on the app and desktop site.

Musk attributed the disruptions to a "massive cyber-attack" originating from the "Ukraine area," though he provided no evidence to support the claim. In a post on X, he speculated that "either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved."

Alp Toker, director of internet watchdog NetBlocks, noted that the outage patterns resembled those of a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack rather than an internal platform error. He described it as one of the longest outages X has experienced, with multiple disruptions over six hours, each having a global impact.

A DDoS attack works by overwhelming a website’s infrastructure with internet traffic, effectively taking it offline. The BBC has reached out to the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, DC, for comment.