Elon Musk announced on Monday that X, formerly known as Twitter, had been hit by a major cyberattack, causing widespread outages for users across the platform.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk posted on the platform, though he did not provide further details.
This is not the first time Musk has attributed technical issues to cyberattacks. Last year, he blamed a similar incident for crashing the platform just as an interview with Donald Trump was about to be streamed, though he did not present evidence to support the claim.
In his post on Monday, Musk shared a message from the DogeDesigner account, which some Reddit users speculated could be linked to him. The post referenced protests against the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, an entity Trump had reportedly entrusted to Musk, along with acts of vandalism at Tesla stores. It also suggested the cyberattack could be part of a broader wave of hostility directed at Musk.
Musk, who is the CEO of Tesla, speculated that launching such a large-scale attack would require substantial financial resources. “It would take a lot of (money) to do an attack of this magnitude,” read a response from the Jammies account in the exchange. “Who has the resources to fund this?”
Musk further suggested that the attack was likely orchestrated by a nation-state or a well-coordinated group, given its scale and impact.
Reports of outages on X began surfacing in the early hours of Monday, with users in Asia, Europe, and North America experiencing disruptions, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks service outages. At the peak of the incident, more than 40,000 users reported issues accessing the platform.
Most of the complaints came from users trying to access X on smartphones, but people using web browsers also encountered problems. “Twitter keeps breaking?” asked @Lalaslovely in the Downdetector chat section.
Starreporters’ correspondence gathered that since Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022, the platform has undergone significant changes, including mass layoffs. The departure of a large portion of its workforce has raised concerns about whether X has enough staff to maintain the platform’s security and stability.