X experiences multiple outages, Musk alleges cyberattack

Three distinct outages appeared to strike Elon Musk's X social media platform on Monday, as he stated it was experiencing a "massive cyberattack."

Downdetector.com initially logged thousands of complaints from users about being unable to access or use the site at around 5:30 a.m. ET. It took nearly an hour before those complaints subsided.

Then, at about 9:30 a.m., the problems seemed to erupt once more, with as many as 40,000 reports of outages recorded. Again, it took roughly an hour for the disruption to subside. Following a few hours of intermittent outages on Monday, Elon Musk took to X to explain why his social media platform was experiencing widespread technical issues.

. "We get attacked daily, but this was executed with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved," he said. However, he did not"There was (still is) a huge cyberattack on X," Musk posted on X at 1:25 p.m. ET, where he has over 219 million followers provide any evidence of a cyberattack.

The outage was believed to resemble a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack a crude yet occasionally potent hacker strategy that floods a site with traffic, essentially taking it offline.

Discussing the incident, Jake Moore, Global Security Advisor at ESET, a global digital security company, said: "Cybercriminals attack from all angles and are incredibly fearless in their attempts. DDoS attacks are a clever way of targeting a company without having to hack into the mainframe, and the perpetrators can remain largely anonymous. This makes it much more difficult to defend against when the landscape is largely unknown, aside from having generic DDoS protection. However, even with such protection, threat actors become better equipped each year, using even more IP addresses, such as home IoT devices, to flood systems, making it increasingly difficult to mitigate these attacks.

"X remains one of the most talked-about platforms, making it a prime target for hackers attempting to make their mark. The only way to future-proof their networks is to continue expecting the unexpected and build even more robust DDoS protection layers."

Elon Musk, who is also the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired Twitter in October 2022 for USD 44 billion and subsequently dismissed approximately 80% of its staff.