Elon Musk's social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced significant outages on Monday morning, affecting thousands of users in the US and UK.

Platform monitor Downdetector reported tens of thousands of technical issue reports from US users, with over 8,000 outage reports from UK users shortly before 14:00 GMT. Connection issues persisted for some users into the afternoon, with many encountering a loading icon while trying to access the platform and refresh feeds.

Musk attributed the outages to a "massive cyber-attack" originating from the Ukraine area, though he provided no evidence to support this claim and did not specify whether state actors were involved. In an interview with Fox Business, Musk stated, "We're not sure exactly what happened but there was a massive cyber-attack to try and bring down the X system with [Internet Protocol] addresses originating in the Ukraine area."

Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, which monitors web service connectivity, suggested that the outages were consistent with past denial of service attacks rather than a configuration or coding error. He noted that the organization observed several major outages spanning more than six hours on Monday, each having a global impact.

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack attempts to take a website offline by overwhelming it with internet traffic. Musk has previously claimed that the platform has been targeted by DDoS attacks, but these have not been confirmed.

Additionally, on Monday, Musk called US Senator Mark Kelly a "traitor" for visiting Ukraine over the weekend. Kelly responded on X, emphasizing the importance of defending freedom as a fundamental tenet of American values.