Elon Musk claims ‘massive cyber-attack’ caused X outages

Elon Musk claimed on Monday afternoon that X was targeted in a “massive cyber-attack” that resulted in the intermittent service outages that had brought down his social network throughout the day. The platform, formerly known as Twitter, had been unresponsive for many users as posts failed to load.

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” the platform’s CEO posted. “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”

Downdetector, a website that monitors outages on various sites and platforms, showed thousands of reports of outages that initially spiked about 5.45am before returning to normal for a few hours. A second surge in reported outages carried on throughout midday, with the majority of them occurring on the company’s mobile app. Tweets that failed to appear displayed a message that “something went wrong” and told users to try reloading.

The richest man in the world did not provide any evidence for his claims. His post came in response to a cryptocurrency influencer who suggested the outage followed other opposition to Musk’s enterprises. Protests against the so-called “department of government efficiency” initiative Musk leads and vandalism against Tesla dealerships had taken place throughout the previous week.

The SpaceX CEO, who acquired Twitter for $44bn in 2022, has also claimed that previous platform outages were the result of cyber-attacks. When his livestreamed interview with Donald Trump almost immediately crashed last year, Musk alleged that it was because of a “massive DDOS attack”. However, a source at the company later told the Verge that there was no attack.

The outages on X add to a variety of issues facing Musk’s businesses and initiatives in recent days. On Friday, one of Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploded mid-flight and rained down debris near the Bahamas. A series of nationwide “Tesla takedown” protests have targeted his car company’s dealerships over the past week, Tesla owners are selling their vehicles, and the company’s stock price declined on Monday to its lowest level in months. Meanwhile, Trump held an intense meeting with Musk and his cabinet secretaries on Friday that resulted in Trump suggesting he would rein in Musk’s power over government staffers, whom the billionaire has fired en masse from multiple agencies.