Users report issues in accessing X across country; Musk claims ‘massive cyberattack’

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

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

Downdetector 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.

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, saying an investigation was under way.

A source in the internet infrastructure industry said X was hit by several waves of denial of service beginning around 9:45 UTC.

The source spoke on the condition of anonymity as the person was not authorised to speak publicly on the matter.

Denial of service works by overwhelming targeted websites with rogue traffic. Such attacks are not necessarily sophisticated but they can cause significant disruption.

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.

With Pakistan marking one year of a ban on X in February, government officials have hinted that the service is unlikely to be restored anytime soon.

The social media platform, which was used by around 4.5 million people in Pakistan, was blocked in February 2024, around 10 days after the general elections, while the caretaker government was still in power.

As users shared claims on X about alleged widespread rigging in the election, the final blow — leading to the complete shutdown — was a press conference by former Rawalpindi commissioner Liaquat Chattha, who accused Chief Election Commissioner Sikandar Sultan Raja and the former chief justice of facilitating the rigging.

More than a year on, there are no indications that the government is considering lifting the ban on X, a PML-N leader from Punjab had told Dawn.

“The lifting of the ban on X is subject to control the PTI’s keyboard warriors’ onslaught against it on social media,” he remarked in a reference to the opposition party’s social media team.

Dawn had reached out to Information Minister Attaullah Tarar, but he refused to give even a tentative timeframe for the restoration of the social media platform. However, Tarar’s own ministry and their counterparts in various government departments, such as the Prime Minister Office, Ministry of Foreign Affairs et al continue to post official statements on the banned platform.

Civil society organisations, rights advocates, journalists and individuals hve called for the immediate restoration of X and urged the government to refrain from taking such arbitrary measures in the future.

They argue the ban violates Article 19 of the Constitution and undermines Pakistan’s international law commitments.

Tale of the ban

In the weeks following the ban on X, the government and telecom regulator, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), repeatedly denied that the platform had been blocked.

The first admission about the restrictions came in March last year when the interior ministry informed the Sindh High Court that X was blocked on the reports of intelligence agencies.

In April, the ministry told the Islamabad High Court that X didn’t adhere to the government’s directives to stop the “misuse of its platform”.

The ban was imposed “in the interest of upholding national security, maintaining public order, and preserving the integrity of our nation”.

The government also claimed that X didn’t “respond adequately” to the Federal Investigation Agency’s requests for blocking accounts involved in defamatory campaigns against former chief justice Qazi Faez Isa and the army chief.

During the year-long suspension, the X management only once made a public comment, when it said it would “continue to work with the Pakistani government to understand their concerns”.