Outages are much more than a small inconvenience, usually throwing off conversations, businesses and world dialogue. On Monday, thousands of users in the US and UK found themselves not able to gain access to their accounts in X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, as it endured several hours of crippling outages. It was not some minor glitch as it turned out to be one of the longest shutdowns in recent history. As they hit refresh on their feeds repeatedly without success, speculation ran wild. Perhaps it was just another case of an ordinary technical failure, or perhaps there was something darker brewing. To top it all up, Elon Musk himself asserted that the blackout was caused by a huge cyber-attack coming from the Ukraine region. Is there any truth to what he said, or maybe this is just another case where Musk’s controversial insights are taking over the center stage?
Widespread Disruptions
Downdetector, which monitors service disruptions, claimed that nearly tens of thousands of US users complained about the technical troubles of X. As the clock hit 14:00 GMT, the UK was also reporting over 8,000 outages, with some of its users still being unable to reconnect well into the afternoon. During the outage, many users attempting to access the platform via app and desktop site were met with infinite loading screens and they were unable to refresh their feeds or interact with content.
Musk Blames Ukraine for Outages
According to Musk, the cause for the interruption was a massive cyber-attack, which he claimed was being carried out by the Ukraine area. He failed to substantiate the allegation with evidence while also failing to specify whether he was implying the assistance of state actors.
In a post on X, Musk suggested that
“either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved”
The BBC also contacted the Ukrainian embassy in the United States for comment but has not received any response yet.
Musk in an interview with FoxNews stated that,
“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”
Stance of Cybersecurity Experts
According to Alp Toker, head of NetBlocks, an organization that monitors connectivity to web services, the outages have the feel of a DDoS attack. He told the BBC,
“What we’ve been seeing is consistent with what we’ve seen in past denial of service attacks, rather than a configuration or coding error in the platform. The organization has seen several major outages spanning more than six hours on Monday, each having global impact. 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”
Traffic overwhelms the servers of a website during a DDoS attack, incapacitating the functionality of a website. Though Musk has claimed in the past that X has been the target of such attacks, a record of independent sources spotting such incidents is lacking.
Elon Musk’s Political Collision with Senator Mark Kelly
During the outage discussions, Musk was entangled in a political conflict with Senator Mark Kelly from Arizona. On Monday, Musk derided Kelly as a “traitor” for his weekend trip to Ukraine and angrily implied that Mark Kelly said on X,
“proved to me we can’t give up on the Ukrainian people”
Senator Mark Kelly replied on X that
“Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do”
Ongoing Suspicions
So far X has not issued an official statement that provides any insight into what might be behind the outages other than Musk’s politically charged claims. Whatever the cause of the outage, whether a cyber-attack or not, it certainly puts into question the stability and security of X under Musk’s stewardship. When social media platforms act in such a way in the digital space, and no matter how brief, it raises questions about how much they can be trusted and relied upon. X has overcome evident internal technical difficulties in the past, but this prolonged outage, when coupled with Musk’s politically charged allegations, adds to the panic surrounding X’s future. Meanwhile, cybersecurity experts are evaluating the outage patterns for confirming the scale of disruption, as well as finding out how it originated.
