Elon Musk blames X outage on ‘massive cyberattack’

The site has been down for several hours on Monday

X, owned by Elon Musk, was experiencing outages throughout the day Monday due to a ‘massive cyberattack,’ Musk says (PA Archive)

Elon Musk claims his social platform X was the victim of a cyberattack, several hours after the site first stopped working.

“There was a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk wrote Monday in a post at 1:25 p.m. ET on the social media site. “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 …”

Efforts to launch the site were met with a blue spinning wheel and a message that read: “Something went wrong. Try reloading.”

It’s not immediately clear who or what group was responsible for the cyberattack against X.

X, owned by Elon Musk, was experiencing outages throughout the day Monday due to a ‘massive cyberattack,’ Musk says (PA Archive)

Social media users first reported issues with the social media platform around 5.30 a.m. on Monday, Downdetector data shows. Hours after the original outage appeared to be resolved, at around 9.30 a.m., even more users reported issues which appear to have continued throughout the day around the world.

More than 34,000 outages on the site were reported by 1 p.m. An hour later, reports continued to pour in, with more than 20,000 people saying they were experiencing outages.

The world’s richest person, who now serves as a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, purchased X in 2022. Since then, he fired a large number of the company’s staff, which led to suggestions that it could suffer from outages. The platform has been largely online since, however, with full outages remaining relatively rare.

Musk has previously warned of cyberattacks against the social media platform.

In August 2024, the tech billionaire blamed a “massive” cyberattack for delaying his live conversation with Trump by 40 minutes. He wrote at the time: “There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.” Some experts at the time were skeptical of Musk’s explanation.