Elon Musk’s social media platform X, previously often known as Twitter, skilled huge outages all through Monday morning that impacted hundreds of customers within the US and UK.
The outage got here as platform monitor Downdetector mentioned it had seen tens of hundreds of stories from US customers of technical points affecting the platform.
There have been greater than 8,000 outage stories from UK customers shortly earlier than 14:00 GMT, following a quick however notable surge of stories on Monday morning.
Connection points lasted for some customers into the afternoon.
Many customers making an attempt to entry the platform and refresh feeds on its app and desktop website throughout Monday’s outages have been met with a loading icon.
Musk claims the outages stemmed from a “huge cyber-attack” that originated “within the Ukraine space”.
However the expertise billionaire, who has been a frequent critic of Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelensky, supplied no proof to help the declare and didn’t say whether or not or not he thought state actors have been concerned.
Earlier, he posted on X that “both a big, coordinated group and/or a rustic is concerned”.
The BBC has approached the Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC for remark.
“We’re unsure precisely what occurred however there was an enormous cyber-attack to attempt to deliver down the X system with [Internet Protocol] addresses originating within the Ukraine space,” Musk mentioned in an interview with the Fox Enterprise channel.
Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, which screens the connectivity of internet providers, mentioned its personal metrics urged the outages might properly be linked to a cyber-attack.
“What we have been seeing is in step with what we have seen in previous denial of service assaults, quite than a configuration or coding error within the platform,” he instructed the BBC.
He mentioned the organisation has seen a number of main outages spanning greater than six hours on Monday, “every having international influence”.
“That is amongst the longest X/Twitter outages we have tracked when it comes to period, and the sample is in step with a denial of service assault focusing on X’s infrastructure at scale,” he added.
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) assault is an try and take an internet site offline by overwhelming it with web site visitors.
Musk has beforehand claimed that the platform has been focused by DDoS assaults, but these have not been confirmed.
Additionally on Monday, Musk referred to as US Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, a “traitor” for going to Ukraine over the weekend. Kelly had mentioned the go to “proved to me we will not surrender on the Ukrainian folks”.
Kelly replied on X: “Elon, should you do not perceive that defending freedom is a primary tenet of what makes America nice and retains us protected, perhaps you must depart it to these of us who do.”
