Musk says X hit by 'cyber-attack' as thousands report outages

Elon Musk Reveals X (Formerly Twitter) Targeted by Massive Cyber-Attack

On Monday, Elon Musk announced that X (formerly Twitter) had fallen victim to a “massive cyber-attack,” causing widespread outages for users in the UK and US.

Having acquired the platform in late 2022, Musk took to X to address the situation, hinting that the attack may still be ongoing. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” he shared in a post on X, further speculating that a “large, coordinated group and/or a country” may be involved in the attack.

Despite reaching out to X for comment, the BBC has not received a response regarding the incident. Downdetector, a platform outage monitor, reported tens of thousands of technical issue reports from US users on Monday, with over 8,000 outage reports from UK users before 14:00 GMT.

Users attempting to access X encountered loading issues, both on the app and desktop site, during the outages. Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, suggested that the outages could be linked to a cyber-attack based on their own metrics, noting a pattern consistent with past denial of service attacks.

“This is amongst the longest X/Twitter outages we’ve tracked in terms of duration, and the pattern is consistent with a denial of service attack targeting X’s infrastructure at scale,” Toker explained.

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack aims to overwhelm a website with internet traffic, effectively taking it offline. While Musk has previously alleged DDoS attacks on the platform, these claims have not been officially confirmed.

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