Elon Musk has blamed Ukraine for a series of outages that left X unavailable to thousands of users, saying the social media platform is being targeted in a “massive cyberattack”,.

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk said in a post on Monday (US time).

“Either a large, co-ordinated group and/or a country is involved.”

Complaints about outages spiked on Monday at 6am local time and again at 10am (early on Tuesday AEDT), with more than 40,000 users reporting no access to the platform, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com.

By afternoon, the reports had dropped to the low thousands.

A sustained outage that lasted at least an hour began at noon, with the heaviest disruptions occurring along the US coasts.

Downdetector.com said that 56 per cent of problems were reported for the X app, while 33 per cent were reported for the website.

“We’re not sure exactly what happened,” Musk told Fox Business.

“But there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”

He gave no further details about the origin of the attack, including whether he believes it is connected to the Ukrainian government.

It is possible to mask IP addresses and make it seem as though traffic is coming from elsewhere. Spoofing locations is often offered by hackers-for-hire.

It was not possible to definitively verify Musk’s claims without seeing technical data from X. The likelihood of that being released was “pretty low”, said Nicholas Reese, an adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs in New York University’s School of Professional Studies and expert in cyber operations.

Reese said the likelihood that a state actor was behind the outages “doesn’t make a lot of sense” given their short duration — unless it was a warning for something larger to come.

“There are kind of two types of cyber attacks — there are ones that are designed to be very loud and there are ones that are designed to be very quiet,” he said.

“The ones that are usually the most valuable are the ones that are very quiet. Something like this was designed to be discovered. So to me that almost certainly eliminates state actors. And the value that they would have gained from it is pretty low.”

Reese said it was possible a group was trying to make a statement with causing X outages, but added that such a temporary outage was “not much of a statement to me”.

“It’s only really a statement if there is some kind of follow-on action, which I would not rule out at this point,” he said.

In March 2023 the social media platform then known as Twitter experienced a bevy of glitches for more than an hour as links stopped working, some users were unable to log in and images were not loading for others.

During Monday’s incidents, “X outage” trended on rival social media platform BlueSky, with some posts welcoming users to the site and urging them to stick around.

Musk bought the former Twitter in 2022 and is also CEO of Tesla.

He’s running X while simultaneously having access to US government data systems as one of US President Donald Trump’s most senior advisers — often wearing a shirt that says “tech support”.

-with AAP