X outage: Thousands report issues with Elon Musk's platform

Elon Musk's social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced a major outage on Monday morning, affecting thousands of users in the United States and the United Kingdom. Platform monitoring agency Downdetector reported that it had received tens of thousands of reports from U.S. users regarding technical issues with the platform. This widespread disruption caused significant inconvenience and frustration for users relying on the platform for communication and information.

Shortly before 14:00 GMT, outage reports from UK users exceeded 8,000, following a brief but significant surge in reports earlier on Monday morning. Some users' problems persisted into the afternoon, encountering loading icons when attempting to access the platform and refresh their feeds on both its app and desktop website. The prolonged nature of these issues underscored the severity of the outage and its impact on user experience.

Musk claimed that the outage stemmed from a "massive cyberattack" that "originated from the region of Ukraine." However, the tech billionaire, who has frequently criticized Ukraine and its President Zelenskyy, offered no evidence to support this claim, nor did he specify whether he believed a state actor was involved. Prior to this, he had posted on X, saying, "Either a large, organized group is involved, or a nation is involved." The BBC has contacted the Ukrainian embassy in Washington D.C. for comment. The lack of concrete evidence has raised questions about the validity of Musk's assertions.

Musk, in an interview with Fox Business, stated, "We're not sure exactly what happened, but there was indeed a large cyberattack trying to overwhelm X's systems with IP addresses originating apparently from the region of Ukraine." Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, which monitors internet service connections, said their own metrics suggested the disruption was most likely related to a cyberattack. Further investigation is needed to determine the exact nature and source of the attack.

Toker told the BBC: "What we're seeing is consistent with a denial-of-service attack as we've seen in the past, rather than a configuration or coding error on the platform." He said the organization observed several significant disruptions lasting more than six hours on Monday, "each with a global impact." He added: "In terms of duration, this is one of the longest disruptions we've tracked on X/Twitter, and the pattern is consistent with a large-scale denial-of-service attack targeting X's infrastructure." A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to overwhelm a website with a flood of internet traffic. The scale and persistence of the outage strongly suggest a coordinated effort to disrupt the platform's services.

Musk has previously claimed the platform was the target of DDoS attacks, but those claims have not been substantiated. Also on Monday, Musk called U.S. Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona a "traitor" because he visited Ukraine over the weekend. Senator Kelly said the visit "demonstrated to me that we cannot abandon the people of Ukraine." Senator Kelly replied on X: "Elon, if you don't understand that defending freedom is a fundamental principle that makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do." This exchange occurred on the X platform. This exchange highlights the ongoing tensions and differing viewpoints surrounding the conflict in Ukraine.