Musk says X hit by 'cyber-attack' as thousands report outages

Elon Musk says X (formerly Twitter) has been deed by a "massive cyber-attack" connected Monday, aft thousands of users successful the UK and US reported outages.

Mr Musk, who has owned the level since precocious 2022, suggested the onslaught whitethorn beryllium ongoing.

"We get attacked each day, but this was done with a batch of resources," helium wrote successful a station connected X.

He suggested that "either a large, coordinated radical and/or a state is involved".

The BBC has approached X for comment.

It comes aft level outage show Downdetector said it had seen tens of thousands of reports from US users of method issues affecting the level connected Monday.

There were much than 8,000 outage reports from UK users soon earlier 14:00 GMT, pursuing a little but notable surge of reports connected Monday morning.

Many users trying to entree the level and refresh feeds connected its app and desktop tract during Monday's outages were met with a loading icon.

Alp Toker, manager of Netblocks, which monitors the connectivity of web services, said its ain metrics suggested the outages could good beryllium linked to a cyber-attack.

"What we've been seeing is accordant with what we've seen successful past denial of work attacks, alternatively than a configuration oregon coding mistake successful the platform," helium told BBC News.

He said the organisation has seen respective large outages spanning much than six hours connected Monday, "each having planetary impact".

"This is amongst the longest X/Twitter outages we've tracked successful presumption of duration, and the signifier is accordant with a denial of work onslaught targeting X's infrastructure astatine scale," helium added.

A distributed denial of work (DDoS) onslaught is an effort to instrumentality a website offline by overwhelming it with net traffic.

Mr Musk has antecedently claimed that the level has been targeted by DDoS attacks, but these person not been confirmed.