Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, was hit by a massive outage on Monday morning. The outage affected thousands of users in the US and UK, causing trouble logging in to the platform and refreshing the feed.
Outage status and user reactions
According to platform monitoring service Downdetector, thousands of users in the US reported technical problems. More than 8,000 outage reports were recorded in the UK around 2:00 pm GMT.
Many users who were trying to refresh the feed on the X app and desktop site were seeing a loading icon, indicating that the platform was not working.
Elon Musk claims: ‘Outage caused by cyber attack’
Elon Musk blamed a “major cyber attack” coming from the “Ukraine region” for the outage. However, he did not present any concrete evidence to support this claim and also did not clarify whether there was any state involvement in it.
Musk posted on X that, “Either a large organized group or a country was involved in this attack.” He later said in an interview to Fox Business Channel, “We are not completely sure what exactly happened, but it was a major cyber attack, which was done to disable the X system. The [Internet Protocol] addresses used for this were associated with the Ukraine region.”
The BBC has contacted the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington DC for Ukraine’s response, but no official statement has come yet.
Netblocks report: DDoS attack likely
Alp Talker, director of Netblocks, an organization that monitors internet services, said that according to his analysis this outage may be related to a cyber attack. He told the BBC, “The pattern we have seen matches the denial of service (DDoS) attacks that have happened in the past. It does not seem to be caused by any internal fault or coding error of the platform.”
He further said that several major outages were seen on Monday, which lasted more than six hours and had a global impact. “This is one of the longest outages ever on X/Twitter, and its pattern points to a large-scale DDoS attack on X’s infrastructure,” he added.
A DDoS attack is a type of cyber attack in which an attempt is made to disable a website through heavy internet traffic. This puts a heavy load on the website, due to which it is unable to work normally.
Elon Musk had previously claimed DDoS attacks on the X platform, but these claims were not officially confirmed.
War of words between Musk and US Senator Mark Kelly
On Monday, a dispute was also seen on X between Elon Musk and US Senator Mark Kelly.
Senator Mark Kelly, who is a member of the Democratic Party from Arizona, recently visited Ukraine. He said after his visit, “This visit convinced me that we cannot abandon the Ukrainian people.”
Musk responded to this by calling Kelly a “traitor”.
In response to this, Senator Kelly said, “Elon, if you do not understand that protecting freedom makes America great and keeps us safe, then maybe it should be left to those who understand it well.”
What happens next?
The recent outage of the X platform caused inconvenience to many users, and questions have been raised about its reliability. X has not made an official statement on the matter, but if it turns out to be a DDoS attack, the company will have to strengthen its cybersecurity further.
Given the outage and Musk’s controversial statements, this has become a hot topic on social media and in the tech world. It remains to be seen what steps X Platform takes regarding its security in the coming days and whether Ukraine responds in this matter. source bbc.com
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