Elon Musk has claimed that his social media platform X – formerly known as Twitter – is currently the target of a “massive cyberattack”
Users have struggled to log into the social media platform following multiple outages on Monday (March 10).
In response, Musk has shared a tweet explaining that X was – and “still is” – the victim of a “massive cyberattack”.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk posted on the platform. “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.”
The platform suffered at least three major disruptions throughout the day, with the first occurring in the early hours of Monday morning.
X users reported being unable to load the site, receiving error messages instead. According to social media outage tracker DownDetector, the first outage peaked with around 17,000 reports of X being down in the U.S., followed by 40,000 during the second outage and 35,000 in the latest wave of disruptions, per Sky News.
Musk later shared a tweet agreeing with a user who claimed that somebody is attempting to “silence” him and the platform.
Musk, who purchased Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, did not specify the exact nature of the attack but suggested it may have involved significant resources, potentially hinting at a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
This type of cyberattack overwhelms a site’s servers with massive amounts of traffic, causing it to crash.
While X has experienced outages before, many were linked to the sweeping changes and layoffs that followed Musk’s takeover of the company. However, this incident coincided with a broader market downturn that saw Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle company, take a major hit in stock value.
Adding to the turbulence, the cyberattack followed a series of physical attacks on Tesla showrooms across Europe and the U.S. over the weekend.
Musk, a divisive figure in global politics, has faced mounting criticism, particularly after his appointment as head of the controversial “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a role focused on cutting U.S. government jobs and spending.
As of now, X has not released an official statement explaining the outages, leaving users and cybersecurity experts speculating about the full extent and nature of the attack.
