Bluesky is a microblogging social media platform known for its similarities to X (formerly Twitter), its former parent company.
Is Twitter down? Thousands of users of the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, reported three rounds of issues Monday morning.
According to the website Down Detector, which monitors outages across the internet, about 19,000 people first reported X issues just before 3 a.m. PT. Those issues seemed to have resolved, before a significantly larger spike of reports just before 7 a.m. and then another burst of reports around 8 a.m.
About 40,000 people reported that X was down at 7:05 a.m. Monday, during the second apparent outage.
More than half the issues were reported on X's app, and about 33% were reported on the website.
Just before 7:30 a.m., some users reported the platform back online, while others reported the site was still down for them.
By 7:40 a.m., outage reports significantly decreased once again, to around 1,000. Reports began increasing again at 8:01 a.m., and as of 8:16 a.m., 25,000 people reported the platform was not working for them.
The reasons behind the outages were not immediately clear.
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A representative for X could not immediately be reached for comment.
On Monday afternoon, Musk posted to X that there had been a "massive cyberattack" against the site.
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"We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources," Musk said. "Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved."
Though he didn’t post any evidence of a cyberattack, experts said that the outage was consistent with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, a rudimentary but sometimes effective hacker tactic to overwhelm a website with traffic, effectively knocking it offline.
Isik Mater, the director of research at NetBlocks, a company that tracks global internet connectivity, told NBC News that X had suffered intermittent outages since Monday morning. While establishing a DDoS attack with certainty can be difficult, Mater said Musk’s claim was plausible.
“It’s difficult to be certain, but given the pattern of three observed outages, a denial service attack targeting X’s infrastructure can’t be ruled out,” she said. “It’s certainly one of the longest X/Twitter outages in our records.”
