X Hit With “Massive Cyberattack,” Elon Musk Says

Elon Musk said Monday that X was hit with a “massive cyberattack.”

“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏,” Musk said.

“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,” he added.

Musk said the company was “tracing” the source.

* Image from Elon Musk X Post *

Per Fast Company:

Users reported intermittent outages on the social media platform on Monday, according to outage tracker Downdetector. In 2022, Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion and made wide-sweeping cuts to its staff and changes to its content policies.

Since then, the billionaire Tesla CEO has endeared himself to President Trump and now plays a key role in the current administration. Musk, leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has brought crews of young tech workers to Washington, D.C., to slash government budgets and workforces.

But Musk’s recent rightward shift and current chaos propagating has caused massive backlash against the world’s richest man.

Shares of Tesla, his electric vehicle company, were down 14% on Monday. The stock has sunk more than 35% in the past month as sales slumped in Europe and investors feared his political activities were taking too much time away from managing his EV company. Tesla has also been the focus of protests, with many taking to dealerships to call out Musk’s sweeping cuts.

A substantial number of X outages were reported, starting Monday morning.

* Image from Downdetector *

Sky News reports:

Around 40,000 users reported they could not access the platform on Monday, according to data from tracking website Downdetector.com.

Complaints about outages spiked at around 10am in the UK, and again at 2pm.

A source in the internet infrastructure industry told the Reuters news agency that the platform had been hit by several waves of denial of service (DoS) attacks at around 9.45am.

According to the National Cyber Security Centre, DoS attacks are attempts to overload a website or network – aiming to degrade its performance or make it completely inaccessible.

Such attacks are not necessarily sophisticated but they can cause significant disruption.