Elon Musk says X target of ‘massive cyberattack’

Elon Musk, owner of X, is pictured on March 9 at the White House. Musk says X has been hit by a cyberattack. Photo / Getty Images via AFP

• Elon Musk said X was hit by a major cyberattack.
• Outages affected tens of thousands of users in Asia, Europe, and North America, according to Downdetector.
• Musk speculated the attack required significant resources, possibly from a country or large group.

Elon Musk said X was hit by a major cyber attack on Monday as outages plagued users of the platform once known as Twitter.

“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk said in a post on the platform.

Musk blamed a cyber attack, providing no evidence, for crashing the site last year when an interview with Donald Trump was to be streamed.

In his post Monday, Musk included an X post from a DogeDesigner account that some on Reddit speculated could be a puppet of the tycoon himself.

The post noted protests against the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) that Trump entrusted to Musk, with Tesla shops being vandalised, suggesting a cyber attack could signal another burst of animosity towards Musk.

Musk is chief of Tesla, his electric car company.

“It would take a lot of (money) to do an attack of this magnitude,” read a post in the exchange by the account of Jammies.

“Who has the resources to fund this?”

Musk also maintained such an attack would take tremendous resources, speculating it was the work of a country or large coordinated group.

Outages on the X social media platform left tens of thousands of users unable to access the site, according to monitors.

Reports of problems with X started in the early hours of Monday, with users in Asia, Europe, and North America saying they could not access the platform, according to the Downdetector tracking site.

At the peak, more than 40,000 people reported outages, the site said.

The bulk of the reports were from people trying to use X on smartphones, but people on web browsers also reported the service down.

“Twitter keeps breaking?” asked a post by @Lalaslovely in the Downdetector chat section.

After Musk bought Twitter for US$44 billion ($77b) in late 2022, the majority of employees left or were fired, raising concerns about whether staffing was in place to keep the platform safe and stable.