Elon Musk Blames ‘Massive Cyberattack’ for Global X Outages

Elon Musk has revealed that X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, was hit by a “massive cyberattack” on Monday, causing widespread outages that lasted for hours across multiple countries.

The disruptions began just before 5 a.m. ET and continued into the afternoon, according to DownDetector.com, which tracked the spikes in reports:

• 5 a.m. ET: Over 20,000 outage reports were logged.

• 9 a.m. ET: Reports surged to nearly 40,000 as users worldwide experienced issues.

• 10 a.m. ET: Another prolonged outage occurred, reaching 30,000 reports and lasting nearly two hours.

Musk responded to speculation that the outage could have been a deliberate attack, particularly after a user referenced recent disruptions at Tesla stores and protests against Dogecoin (DOGE).

“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk posted. “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.”

Users reported issues with both the X mobile app and the web browser version, with error messages like “Posts aren’t loading right now” and Cloudflare-related errors preventing access. The outages were not limited to the United States tens of thousands of reports flooded in from the United Kingdom and Europe as well.

By 1 p.m. ET, reports of outages had dropped significantly, though Musk’s claim that a state-level actor might be involved raises serious cybersecurity concerns.

This is not the first time X has gone down in a major disruption the last widespread outage occurred in August 2024. However, the scale of Monday’s cyberattack suggests something far more sophisticated.

With Musk now actively investigating the source, the question remains: Was this simply a highly organized group of hackers, or could a foreign adversary be testing new cyber warfare tactics against a Musk-owned platform?

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