Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, faced a major disruption on Monday, affecting thousands of users in the United States and the United Kingdom.
According to outage tracker Downdetector, tens of thousands of users in the U.S. reported technical difficulties, while over 8,000 reports emerged from the UK just before 14:00 GMT. The issue persisted for some users well into the afternoon.
During the outage, many users attempting to access X via its app or desktop site were met with an endless loading icon, preventing them from refreshing feeds or engaging with content.
Musk later claimed that the disruption resulted from a "massive cyber-attack" originating "in the Ukraine area." However, he did not provide evidence to support the claim or clarify whether he believed state actors were involved.
Earlier, Musk stated on X that "either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved." The BBC has reached out to the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, D.C., for a response.
In an interview with Fox Business, Musk said, "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."
Cybersecurity experts have suggested that the outage aligns with patterns typically seen in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, where a website is overwhelmed with internet traffic to force it offline.
Alp Toker, director of internet observatory group NetBlocks, stated that their metrics indicate the disruptions are consistent with previous DDoS attacks rather than an internal coding error. "This is among 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," Toker said.
Musk has previously claimed that X has been targeted by such attacks, though these allegations have not been independently verified.
Meanwhile, on Monday, Musk also criticized U.S. Senator Mark Kelly, calling him a "traitor" after the Arizona Democrat visited Ukraine. Kelly had posted that the trip reinforced his belief that the U.S. should not abandon Ukraine. In response, he wrote 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."
