United States: Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter has suffered widespread outages, affecting thousands of users in the US and UK.
Downdetector reported tens of thousands of outage reports from American users, while UK users raised more than 8,000 complaints by early afternoon. Many users were unable to refresh their feeds, facing a persistent loading icon. Some experienced connectivity issues well into the afternoon.
Musk attributed the disruptions to a “massive cyber-attack” originating from the “Ukraine area,” though he delivered no evidence to support the claim. Musk suggested that, “either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.” The Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC has not yet responded to requests for comment.
Alp Toker, director of the internet monitoring group Netblocks, noted that the outages showed patterns consistent with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. He described the troubles as some of the longest-lasting global outages X has experienced, spanning over six hours.
Meanwhile, Musk engaged in a heated exchange on X with US Senator Mark Kelly, who recently visited Ukraine. Musk called Kelly a “traitor,” prompting the senator. Kelly responded that, “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.”
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