The X app experienced three separate outages on Monday, which Elon Musk’s X social media site attributed to a “massive cyberattack.” Initially, thousands of users reported difficulty accessing or using the site around 5:30 a.m. ET on Monday, as noted by Downdetector.com. These issues subsided after about an hour. However, around 9:30 a.m., the problems resurfaced, with up to 40,000 outage reports detected before resolving an hour later. The disruptions occurred once more around 11:10 a.m., according to Downdetector. A spokesperson for X was not available for immediate comment.
In a post on X later that day, Musk revealed the site had been targeted by a significant cyberattack, suggesting it was carried out with substantial resources. While no evidence was provided, experts indicated the outages were consistent with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, a common tactic used by hackers to overload a website with traffic, causing it to go offline.
Isik Mater, the director of research at NetBlocks, a company monitoring global internet connectivity, noted that X had experienced intermittent outages since Monday morning. Mater explained that confirming a DDoS attack can be challenging but deemed Musk’s claim plausible given the observed patterns of the three outages. Musk later stated in an interview that the cyberattack originated from IP addresses in Ukraine. However, experts caution that IP addresses may not accurately reflect the attacker’s location, as large DDoS attacks typically involve hijacked devices from various locations worldwide.
