Elon Musk says that X (formerly Twitter) was hit by a “massive cyber attack” on Monday, after thousands of users in the United Kingdom and the United States reported breakdowns.
Mr. Musk, who has owned the platform since the end of 2022, suggested that the attack could be in progress.
“We are attacked every day, but it has been done with a lot of resources,” he wrote in an article on X.
He suggested that “be a large coordinated group and / or a country is involved”.
The BBC approached X to comment.
He came after the Downdector of the platform surface monitor said he had seen tens of thousands of American user reports of technical problems affecting the platform on Monday.
There were more than 8,000 British user landing reports shortly before 2:00 p.m. GMT, following a brief but notable increase in reports on Monday morning.
Many users trying to access the platform and refresh flows on its application and office site during Monday failures encountered a loading icon.
Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, who monitors the connectivity of web services, said that his own measures have suggested that breakdowns may well be linked to a cyber attack.
“What we have seen is consistent with what we have seen in the attacks on past service denial, rather than a configuration or coding error in the platform,” he told BBC News.
He said that the organization had seen several major failures covering more than six hours on Monday, “each with a global impact”.
“It is among the longest X / Twitter breakdowns that we have followed in terms of duration, and the model is consistent with a denial of service attack targeting the large-scale X infrastructure,” he added.
A distributed service denial attack (DDOS) is an attempt to withdraw a website by overwhelming it with Internet traffic.
Mr. Musk previously said that the platform had been targeted by DDOS attacks, but these have not been confirmed.
