Users of the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced intermittent outages Monday morning, according to Downdetector, which tracks user reports on problems across various websites.

Three major outages were reported between 6 a.m. and noon Eastern time, with a peak of nearly 41,000 reports of outages at 10 a.m. Most reported problems were associated with the X app.

X is commonly used as a news-breaking platform, and Monday’s outages coincided with the beginning of the NFL’s free agency negotiation period — one of the busiest days on the NFL calendar in terms of player movement and roster acquisition. Within the first hour of the negotiation period, 17 of The Athletic’s Top 150 free agents were reported to have agreed to new contract terms.

The break in routine didn’t slow the news cycle, and many users were pushed elsewhere to stay up to date. Per Google Trends, three of the top five related queries for searches of “twitter down” mentioned NFL free agency and the No. 2 related search was “Bluesky,” a competing social media site.

When X began working again in the early afternoon, Mike McCartney, an NFL agent with Vayner Sports, posted “Not enjoying this game of yo-yo @X.”

Elon Musk, who purchased X in 2022, acknowledged the outage on Monday afternoon in a post that read, “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. Tracing …”.

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(Photo: Pavlo Gonchar / SOPA Images / Sipa USA via Associated Press)