Elon Musk claims X being targeted in ‘massive cyber attack’ as service goes down
Downdetector.com said that 56% of problems were reported for the X app, while 33% were reported for the website.
Hours after a series of outages Monday that left X unavailable to thousands of users, Elon Musk claimed that the social media platform was being targeted in a “massive cyber attack.”
“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Mr Musk claimed in a post. “Either a large, co-ordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing …”
There were more than 28,000 users reporting outages at 11.28am Eastern Time, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com.
More than 40,000 users reported an outage around 10am and there were earlier outages being reported by users earlier on Monday.
Downdetector.com said that 56% of problems were reported for the X app, while 33% were reported for the website.
It is not possible to definitively verify Mr Musk’s claims without seeing technical data from X, and the likelihood of them releasing that is “pretty low”, said Nicholas Reese, an adjunct instructor at the Centre for Global Affairs in New York University’s School of Professional Studies and expert in cyber operations.
Mr Reese said the likelihood that a state actor is behind the outages “doesn’t make a lot of sense” given their short duration — unless it was a warning for something larger to come.
“There are kind of two types of cyber attacks — there are ones that are designed to be very loud and there are ones that are designed to be very quiet,” he said.
“And the ones that are usually the most valuable are the ones that are very quiet. Something like this was designed to be discovered. So to me that almost certainly eliminates state actors. And the value that they would have gained from it is pretty low.”
Mr Reese added that it is possible that a group was trying to make a statement with causing X outages, but added that such a temporary outage “is not much of a statement to me”.
“It’s only really a statement if there is some kind of follow on action, which I would not rule out at this point,” he said.
“X outage” was trending on rival social media platform BlueSky, with some posts welcoming users to the site and urging them to stick around.
Mr Musk bought the former Twitter in 2022 and also serves as the chief executive of Tesla. He is running X while simultaneously having access to US government data systems — often wearing a shirt that says “tech support”.
In March 2023 the social media platform then known as Twitter experienced a bevy of glitches for more than an hour as links stopped working, some users were unable to log in and images were not loading for others.
