After several hours of recurring outages Monday, Elon Musk took to X to explain why his social media network experienced widespread technical problems.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏,” Musk wrote Monday in a post at 1:25 p.m. ET on X, where he has more than 219 million followers. “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 first began reporting problems accessing X at around 5:30 a.m. ET on March 10. After those appeared to clear up, another outage began affecting X user access at about 9:30 a.m. ET — followed by a third significant spike in error complaints around 11 a.m. ET, according to website monitoring service Downdetector.
Some X users, when they tried to access the service, saw error messages from Cloudflare, a content delivery network and cybersecurity services provider, that said, “Web server is returning an unknown error.”
Musk is the multibillionaire tech executive who has become a close ally of President Donald Trump, heading up the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has laid off thousands of U.S. government employees and shut down federal programs in a matter of weeks. Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and Space X, acquired Twitter in October 2022 in a deal worth $44 billion and laid off about 80% of its staff.
Tesla, for one, has been the target of a broad range of attacks and protests in recent weeks. The backlash has been ignited by Musk’s DOGE cutbacks and his major influence within the Trump administration.
Musk rebranded Twitter as X — the mogul’s favorite letter — in July 2023. Earlier, he had announced that he was going to change Twitter into X, “the everything app.”
From Variety US