X Suffers Major Outages as Musk Blames Cyber-Attack from "Ukraine Area"
Elon Musk's social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), faced widespread outages on Monday morning, affecting thousands of users across the US and UK.
According to Downdetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions, tens of thousands of US users reported technical issues. In the UK, more than 8,000 outage reports were logged just before 14:00 GMT, following an earlier surge of complaints in the morning. Some users continued experiencing connection problems into the afternoon.
During the outages, many users encountered a loading icon while attempting to refresh feeds on the app and desktop site.
Musk attributed the disruption to a "massive cyber-attack" allegedly originating from the "Ukraine area." However, he did not provide any evidence to support this claim or clarify whether he believed state actors were involved.
"Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved," Musk posted on X.
In an interview with Fox Business, he reiterated: "We're not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyber-attack to try and bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area."
The BBC has reached out to the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, DC, for comment.
Possible Cyber-Attack?
Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks—a group that monitors internet connectivity—stated that the disruptions were consistent with past cyber-attacks.
"What we've been seeing aligns with previous denial-of-service attacks rather than an internal platform error," Toker told the BBC.
He noted that X experienced multiple six-hour-long outages on Monday, each with a global impact.
"This ranks among the longest X/Twitter outages we've tracked, and the pattern suggests a large-scale denial-of-service attack targeting X's infrastructure," he added.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack occurs when a website is overwhelmed with traffic, forcing it offline. While Musk has previously claimed X has been targeted by DDoS attacks, none have been officially confirmed.
Musk vs. Senator Kelly
Monday also saw tensions flare between Musk and US Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, who had visited Ukraine over the weekend. Musk called Kelly a "traitor" for the trip, while the senator defended his stance.
Kelly responded: "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."
The exchange unfolded on X, the very platform experiencing outages.
