Multiple outages suffered Monday by the social media platform X were the result of a “massive cyberattack,” said Elon Musk, the company’s owner.
“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,” Musk said in part in a post on X.
More than 40,000 reports of an outage at X were received on Tuesday morning by DownDetector, a site that tracks online problem reports from users.
X has undergone some major outages since Musk acquired the company in 2022. In the aftermath of the acquisition, Musk fired top executives and laid off half of the company’s staff.
The platform, then known as Twitter, suffered a user outage in February 2023 that lasted for hours and required an emergency fix, prompting an apology from the company.
Telsa, SpaceX and X CEO Elon Musk arrives to the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla/Pool/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP
Musk, who has nearly 220 million followers on the platform, has taken a prominent role in the Trump administration as a leading figure behind the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. As of last month, the cost-cutting group had gained access to at least 15 government agencies.
In addition to the outages at X, Musk faced challenges on Monday at another company that he leads: Tesla. Alongside a widespread stock market selloff, shares of Tesla plummeted more than 13% in value.
