Elon Musk says X is down due to cyberattacks

3 days ago 1

Elon Musk’s X was inaccessible on Monday morning for thousands of users, including many in the U.S. After about eight hours of outages, Musk posted that the platform is facing a “massive cyberattack.”

“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏. 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. Tracing …” he wrote on X.

Though there is no evidence of Musk’s claims beyond his word, it’s not farfetched to believe that his platform would be vulnerable to cyberattacks. Musk has become more prominent and controversial than ever under President Donald Trump’s second administration, as he has personally led his team called “DOGE” through haphazard cuts to government funding, jobs, and international aid programs.

Tesla stores have also been subject to protests over Musk’s outsized, unelected role in the government, with the stock of Musk’s car company dropping as well.

According to Downdetector, a

website that tracks users’ reports of online outages, X went down for some users around 5:30 a.m. ET, with more than 20,000 users reporting outages. Though these outages seemed to have resolved after about an hour, the outages returned around 9:30 a.m. ET, with more than 40,000 users reporting issues. Though some users were able to access X intermittently, the issues continued past 1:30 PM ET.

Occasional outages are normal for platforms of this size, but are never convenient for their users — as one user lamented in the comments on Downdetector, “on day 1 of the NFL free agency!? ELON Fix this.”

Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.

Send tips through Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to (929) 593-0227. For anything else, email amanda@techcrunch.com.

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