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”.
The BBC has approached 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 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.
“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,” he told the BBC.
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.
Musk has previously claimed that the platform has been targeted by DDoS attacks, but these have not been confirmed.
Also on Monday, Musk called US Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, a “traitor” for going to Ukraine over the weekend. Kelly had said the visit “proved to me we can’t give up on the Ukrainian people”.
Kelly replied 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.”
