Users of Elon Musk-owned social media platform X were having trouble accessing their accounts on Monday. The site came back online briefly only to go down again. The reason for the cut is not yet clear, but Mr Musk has blamed it on an ongoing "massive" cyber attack.
The billionaire owner of X said the platform gets attacked every day but that this latest was "done with a lot of resources".
"Either a large, co-ordinated group and/or a country is involved," he said on his account after X came back on line. "Tracing."
In response to his post, X user Hassan Sajwani wrote, "They want to silence you and this platform," to which the Mr Musk replied, "Yes."
Later on Monday during an interview with Larry Kudlow on Fox Business channel, Mr Musk was asked about the alleged cyber attack.
“We’re not sure what happened,” he said.
“There was a massive cyber attack trying to bring down the whole system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”
Whatever or the origin of the outage, many around the world were met with a message for several hours on X that read: “Posts aren't loading right now."
DownDetector, a website that tracks internet cuts, reported two significant spurts of user problems with X between 4am and 11am ET. NetBlocks, which tracks cyber security and digital governance, also confirmed the cut.
“X (formerly Twitter) is experiencing international outages, but the incident is not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering,” a post from NetBlocks read.
By several estimates, X is used by about 600 million users, making it one of the most popular social media sites globally. It was bought by Tesla and SpaceX tycoon Mr Musk in 2022, who cut staff throughout the company.
His support of US President Donald Trump, coupled with ample posts containing misinformation and disinformation, has thrust X into various controversies, prompting several advertisers to leave the platform, and causing hundreds of thousands of users to flee.
X's dominance has also been chipped away at with the debut of Meta's Threads platform and BlueSky, which many consider to be a decentralised version of it.
In addition to social networking, X has also ventured into the AI space, by incorporating xAI's Grok 3 chatbot into the platform for users signing up for premium services.
As of the writing of this article, X appeared to be working, although still occasionally glitchy. X and Elon Musk have not yet posted about the cut to the service.
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Tailors and retailers miss out on back-to-school rush
Tailors and retailers across the city said it was an ominous start to what is usually a busy season for sales.
With many parents opting to continue home learning for their children, the usual rush to buy school uniforms was muted this year.
“So far we have taken about 70 to 80 orders for items like shirts and trousers,” said Vikram Attrai, manager at Stallion Bespoke Tailors in Dubai.
“Last year in the same period we had about 200 orders and lots of demand.
“We custom fit uniform pieces and use materials such as cotton, wool and cashmere.
“Depending on size, a white shirt with logo is priced at about Dh100 to Dh150 and shorts, trousers, skirts and dresses cost between Dh150 to Dh250 a piece.”
A spokesman for Threads, a uniform shop based in Times Square Centre Dubai, said customer footfall had slowed down dramatically over the past few months.
“Now parents have the option to keep children doing online learning they don’t need uniforms so it has quietened down.”
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2: Denounce violence and the rhetoric of hatred
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4: Comply with all recommendations of the Summit between the US and Muslim countries held in May 2017 in Saudi Arabia.
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