KARACHI: Users across Pakistan reported issues in accessing social media platform X on Monday, according to an outage-tracking website, as platform owner Elon Musk claimed a “massive cyberattack” was under way against the service, Dawn.com reported.

It bears mentioning that X remains officially banned in Pakistan for access and use.

Downdetector.com, the outage-tracking website, showed that 65 reports were received about X from users in Pakistan at 3:02pm, indicating “possible problems” with the service. This surged to 109 reports at 9:32pm.

The reports about disruption of access were received from Lahore, Rawalpindi and Karachi.

Meanwhile, the tracker said X was also facing intermittent outages in the United States, restricting thousands of users from accessing the social media platform.

Musk sees ‘massive cyberattack’ behind disruptions

The number of outage reports rose to around 26,579 after falling briefly, user-submitted data on the outage-tracking website showed. The number was as high as 40,000 earlier in the day.

More than 10,800 X users in the UK also reported the outage earlier in the day, according to the website.

Musk said the disruption was the result of a cyberattack.

“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X. We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved,” Musk said in a post on the platform, adding that an investigation was under way.

Internet tracking monitor NetBlocks also reported at 7:17pm that X was experiencing international outages, adding that the incident was not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering.

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2025