X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced a "massive cyber-attack" on Monday, leading to widespread outages across the UK and US. Thousands of users reported issues accessing the platform, both on its app and desktop site. Elon Musk, the platform's owner since late 2022, suggested that a large, organized entity might be behind the attack, which is still potentially ongoing.
Reports of technical difficulties began to surface early Monday morning. Downdetector, a service that monitors platform outages, recorded tens of thousands of complaints from users in the US. Meanwhile, over 8,000 outage reports emerged from the UK shortly before 14:00 GMT. Users faced persistent loading icons when attempting to refresh their feeds or access the site.
Elon Musk has previously mentioned that X has been a target for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, though none have been confirmed until now.
"We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources." – Elon Musk
Netblocks, an internet observatory led by director Alp Toker, noted several significant outages on Monday that spanned over six hours and had a global impact. Toker suggested the outages might be linked to a cyber-attack.
"This is amongst the longest X/Twitter outages we've tracked in terms of duration, and the pattern is consistent with a denial of service attack targeting X's infrastructure at scale." – Alp Toker
The scale and coordination of the attack have raised questions about who might be responsible. Musk speculated that it could involve a large group or even a nation-state.
"Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved." – Elon Musk
The BBC reached out to X for comments regarding the situation. As of now, the platform continues to grapple with the ongoing technical difficulties that have disrupted service throughout the day.