Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter, suffered widespread outages on Monday, affecting thousands of users across the US and UK.

According to platform monitor Downdetector, tens of thousands of US users reported technical issues, while over 8,000 UK users experienced disruptions around 14:00 GMT. Connection problems persisted into the afternoon, with users encountering loading icons when trying to refresh feeds on both the app and desktop site.

Musk attributed the outages to a “massive cyber-attack” originating from the “Ukraine area,” though he provided no evidence to support the claim. He later suggested that a "large, coordinated group and/or a country" could be responsible. The BBC has reached out to the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, DC, for comment.

Cybersecurity experts, including Alp Toker from NetBlocks, confirmed that the disruptions were consistent with previous distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, where a website is overwhelmed with traffic to force it offline. He noted that multiple six-hour outages had a global impact, making it one of the longest disruptions tracked for X/Twitter.

Musk has previously claimed that X has been targeted by cyber-attacks, though no official confirmations have been made.

The outages coincided with a political clash between Musk and US Senator Mark Kelly. Musk called the Arizona Democrat a “traitor” after Kelly visited Ukraine and voiced continued support for the country. Kelly responded on X, stating, "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."

Source: BBC