Elon Musk claims X being targeted in ‘massive cyberattack’ as service goes down

FILE – Workers install lighting on an “X” sign atop the company headquarters, formerly known as Twitter, in downtown San Francisco, on Friday, July 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

By MICHELLE CHAPMAN AP Business Writer

Hours after a series of outages Monday that left X unavailable to thousands of users, Elon Musk claimed that the social media platform was being targeted in a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk claimed in a post. “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing …”

Complaints about outages spiked Monday at 6 a.m. Eastern and again at 10 a.m, with more than 40,000 users reporting no access to the platform, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com.

A sustained outage that lasted at least an hour began at noon, with the heaviest disruptions occurring along the U.S. coasts.

Downdetector.com said that 56% of problems were reported for the X app, while 33% were reported for the website.

In March 2023 the social media platform then known as Twitter experienced a bevy of glitches for over an hour as links stopped working, some users were unable to log in and images were not loading for others.