U.S.-based social media platform X suffered a service disruption on Monday, leaving thousands of users around the world unable to access the platform, according to outage monitoring site Downdetector.

Starting from 1315GMT, more than 40,000 users reported problems accessing X.

Some 53% of complaints were related to the application, 21% to the feed and timeline, and 16% to the website.

Downdetector compiled data from user-submitted reports, meaning the actual number of affected users could be higher.

The breakdown was "not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering," said Netblocks, which regularly flags technical issues with popular online services and sites, as well as interference by national governments.

Its most recent posts about similar outages for X came on Feb. 9, the day of the Super Bowl in the U.S., and Feb. 1.

There was also a spike in user reports of problems with X at around 0130 GMT Monday, according to aggregation website Down Detector.

AFP journalists in countries including France and Thailand were also unable to access X.

Spokespeople for X did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment.

Musk laid off thousands of people at the former Twitter and changed its name after buying the service in 2022.

He has since merged it with his xAI company, which develops the Grok chatbot.

xAI is set to, in turn, be absorbed by Musk's rocket firm SpaceX, with that merged entity expected to go public as early as summer this year.