American billionaire Elon Musk announced that the platform X, which he owns, is undergoing a major cyberattack after thousands of users reported problems accessing it.
Musk posted his message in response to another post that linked protests against “DOJ” (the Government Efficiency Committee headed by the billionaire) and Tesla stores “which were attacked,” and the current outage of X, without providing any evidence.
He added, “We are under attack every day, but this attack was organized with numerous resources. Either there is a coordinated group involved or a country behind it. We are investigating.”
Around 10:00 AM local time in the United States on Monday, about 40,000 people on the East Coast of the country indicated that they were facing an outage on the platform.
A source from the internet infrastructure sector—who requested anonymity as they were not authorized to speak on the matter—stated that X had been experiencing a series of service disruptions starting around 9:45 AM UTC.
Service disruptions are usually caused by flooding the targeted sites with unwanted traffic. While these attacks are not necessarily complicated, they can cause significant downtime.
The website that tracks online outages, DownDetector.com, reported that X faced intermittent outages, preventing 11,745 users in the United States from accessing the platform as of 1:46 PM Eastern Time (17:46 GMT).
The social network has experienced several disruptions since Musk acquired it at the end of 2022. In February and December 2023, tens of thousands of users worldwide confirmed that they were encountering problems using the platform.
Musk—who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX—fired three-quarters of the platform’s employees in the months following his acquisition, and is now trying to implement the same approach with the U.S. government.
After being appointed by President Donald Trump to head a government efficiency agency, Musk took steps to dismantle many government agencies, accusing them of corruption and waste, while also firing tens of thousands of employees.
