Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, suffered widespread disruptions on Monday morning. Thousands of users in the US and UK faced connection issues that persisted into the afternoon. Many trying to access the platform on both desktop and mobile encountered a loading icon instead of their usual feeds.
Downdetector, a platform monitoring service, received tens of thousands of outage reports from users in the US. In the UK, more than 8,000 reports surfaced just before 14:00 GMT, following a sharp rise in complaints earlier in the day.
Musk Links Disruptions to Cyber-Attack
Elon Musk attributed the outages to a “massive cyber-attack” originating “in the Ukraine area.” However, he provided no evidence to support this claim and did not clarify whether he believed a government was behind it. He suggested on X that “either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.” Speaking to Fox Business, he reiterated that the attack aimed to bring down X using Internet Protocol (IP) addresses traced back to Ukraine.
Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, a group that tracks internet disruptions, said the data indicated a cyber attack could be responsible. “What we’ve observed aligns with patterns of previous denial-of-service attacks, rather than an internal configuration or coding failure,” he told the BBC. He noted that multiple outages lasting over six hours each had a global impact. The attack appeared consistent with a large-scale effort to overwhelm X’s infrastructure.
Political Tensions Flare Amid Outage
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack occurs when attackers flood a website with excessive internet traffic to force it offline. Musk has previously claimed that X faced DDoS attacks, but such incidents remain unverified.
Meanwhile, Musk engaged in a heated exchange with US Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, who had recently visited Ukraine. Musk called him a “traitor” for the trip, while Kelly defended his stance. “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,” Kelly responded. The conversation unfolded publicly on X, further intensifying debates surrounding Musk’s views on Ukraine.
This incident has also sparked broader concerns about how such disruptions could impact the business of social media platforms. To read more about this developing story on New York Mirror.