Massive Outage on X: Thousands Face Disruptions on Elon Musk’s Platform – What You Need to Know

Elon Musk’s platform X, which many know as Twitter, faced significant outages on Monday morning. Users in the US and UK reported trouble accessing the site, with systems down for thousands.

Downdetector, a site that tracks online issues, recorded a surge of complaints. Over 8,000 reports came from UK users alone around 2 PM GMT, alongside many US reports earlier in the day. Some users continued experiencing problems well into the afternoon, seeing only a loading icon when trying to refresh their feeds.

Musk suggested that these outages were caused by a “massive cyber-attack,” supposedly tracing back to the Ukraine region. However, he didn’t provide any evidence to support this claim. In an interview, he mentioned that a coordinated group or even a country might be behind it.

Alp Toker from Netblocks, an organization that tracks web service stability, noted that the outage patterns were similar to past denial of service attacks. He indicated that these interruptions likely resulted from deliberate actions to overwhelm the platform’s infrastructure.

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack occurs when multiple systems flood a website with traffic to take it offline. Though Musk has previously stated that X faced DDoS attacks, these claims have not been confirmed.

In addition to the technical issues, Musk got into a heated exchange with US Senator Mark Kelly over the senator’s recent visit to Ukraine. Musk labeled Kelly a “traitor,” while Kelly defended the importance of supporting Ukraine, stating it’s vital for freedom and safety.

This situation highlights not just technical challenges for X but also the ongoing complexities surrounding geopolitical events and social media discourse.

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