Musk blames ‘massive cyberattack’ for X outages; Tesla shares tumble

Elon Musk has blamed widespread disruptions on his social media platform X on a “massive cyberattack,” which he claimed was orchestrated by a “large, coordinated group” or country.

Tens of thousands of users globally reported intermittent outages on X overnight, according to the monitoring website Down Detector. New posts were failing to load for users in countries including the US, UK, France and India at various points throughout Monday. The service disruptions lasted a few minutes each.

Elon Musk during a Cabinet meeting with at the White House last month,Credit: AP

Musk later acknowledged that the platform had experienced a site-wide disruption.

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” he wrote in a post on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

Dark Storm, a pro-Palestinian ‘hacktivist’ group, took credit for the attack via its Telegram page, but has not provided proof that it was behind the disruptions. A representative for Dark Storm told Bloomberg News that the attack was part of a wider hacktivist effort against Israel.

A spokesperson for X did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

This isn’t the first time Musk has cited a cyberattack for disruptions on his social media platform. Last year, Musk similarly blamed a “massive” cyberattack for the delay of a conversation between himself and then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on X.

At that time, he described the attack, without evidence, as a distributed denial-of-service, or DDOS, attack. A DDOS attack involves hackers flooding a site with more internet traffic than it can handle to overload its servers and other operations.

The latest outages on X come as shares of Musk’s electric carmaker Tesla plunged the most since 2020 on growing concerns across Wall Street about its deliveries.

Its stock tumbled more than 15 per cent overnight, widening its loss this year to 41 per cent, after analysts cut their projections both for the first quarter and the full year.

UBS analyst Joseph Spak sees Tesla delivering only 367,000 vehicles this quarter, a 16 per cent reduction from his prior estimate. He’s also no longer expecting the company to sell more vehicles in 2025 than last year, projecting a roughly 5 per cent annual drop.

Tesla executives have said the company will return to growth in 2025.

“While we do expect the Model Y refresh to help, we believe orders are somewhat muted,” Spak wrote in a report to clients. He cited Tesla’s website in China showing that customers only need to wait two to four weeks for delivery of the new SUV.

In addition to disruptions related to changing over its most important model to a new design, blowback against Musk is hurting Tesla’s standing in some of the world’s biggest EV markets early this year. In Germany, for instance, registrations plummeted 70 per cent during the first two months of the year as Musk weighed in on the country’s closely contested federal election.

In China — the world’s biggest EV market — Tesla is among the manufacturers struggling to keep up with domestic champion BYD. Vehicle shipments from the Musk-led company’s plant in Shanghai plunged 49 per cent in February to just 30,688 vehicles, the lowest monthly figure since July 2022.

Bloomberg

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