Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk responded after X, the social media platform he owns, faced multiple outages around the world on Monday.
Outage-tracking website DownDetector.com tracked outages beginning just before 5 a.m. ET and lasting until past noon. At 5 a.m. ET, the total number of outage reports was more than 20,000. Another spike in reports occurred around 9 a.m. ET, and reached nearly 40,000. A third prolonged spike in outage reports took place just over an hour later, peaking at just under 30,000 reports and sustaining that number for nearly two hours.
“First, protests against DOGE. Then, Tesla stores were attacked. Now, X is down. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that this downtime is the result of an attack on X,” DOGE Designer posted.
Musk responded, saying that he agreed and planned to investigate.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X. 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,” he posted.
According to Variety, the reports of outages were not localized to the United States — and users as far away as Europe had reported issues using the site. The initial reports, which spiked around 5 a.m. ET, included just over 10,000 reports from the United Kingdom.
The issues extended to both the mobile app and the web browser version of the site, with just over half of all users reporting that the app was down and just over one-third reporting issues with the browser version.
Users attempting to load the site saw a variety of different issues, from Cloudflare errors to messages that read, “Posts aren’t loading right now. Please try again.”
By 1 p.m. ET, reports of outages on the DownDetector site had dropped off precipitously.
The last widespread X outage occurred in August of 2024.
