Billionaire Elon Musk said microblogging platform X suffered a massive cyberattack on Monday, suspecting it may have been orchestrated by a large, coordinated group or a nation-state.
The attack reportedly led to three outages throughout the day, each lasting nearly an hour.
Musk Reacts
Musk took to X early Monday afternoon, stating he believed a “large, coordinated group and/or a country” was responsible for the disruption, though he did not provide any evidence or confirm a specific motive behind the attack.
When a user suggested on X that certain entities were attempting to silence Musk and his platform, he simply responded, “Yes.” However, further details about the incident or confirmation of a targeted cyberattack have yet to be disclosed.
Outage Report
According to the outage tracking site DownDetector, X began experiencing issues around 6 a.m. ET on Monday, with up to 20,538 users reporting problems.
The disruptions temporarily eased before surging again, with nearly 40,000 users reporting outages by 10 a.m. ET. Reports of outages started declining around 2 p.m. ET and gradually subsided throughout the afternoon.
The outages surged again at 7:30 pm with 1,500 reports, and continued later around 9:00 pm as users faced further access issues.
The tracking website showed that nearly 52 percent of problems were related to the website, 41 percent to the app and 8 percent had to do with server connection problems.
DownDetector’s data is self-reported, meaning it may not fully capture the scale of the outage.
Elon Musk acquired X in 2022 for $44 billion. In 2023, he became the first person to reach 200 million followers on X.
Elon Musk has previously attributed technical issues on X to potential cyberattacks. In August 2024, when his live conversation with former U.S. President Donald Trump was delayed by 42 minutes, Musk suggested there was a “probability” of an attack, although no conclusive evidence was presented at the time.
(With inputs from IBNS)
