X cyberattack: Elon Musk says ‘large group or country’ involved

Elon Musk has claimed that X was hit by a ‘massive cyberattack’ after the social media platform suffered a string of outages on Monday.

Elon Musk wears a shirt that says "Tech Support" as he speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House. Picture: AFP.

Elon Musk has claimed that X was hit by a “massive cyberattack” after the social media platform suffered a string of outages on Monday.

Users began reporting issues with the site at about 5.30am ET (8.30pm AEDT), according to the website DownDetector, which tracks internet outages. The problems appeared to abate before another wave of complaints at 10am ET, with some 40,000 users reporting that the platform would not load. The issues returned again at about 12.30pm ET, prompting Musk to issue a statement.

“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk told his 219 million followers. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, co-ordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing …”

Elon Musk. Picture: AFP.

Some X users reported seeing error messages from the content delivery network Cloudflare that said: “Web server is returning an unknown error.” The service continued to drop in and out throughout Monday morning.

Since buying Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, later rebranding the company as X, Musk has turned the platform into a conservative forum. The billionaire posts up to 200 times a day and his support underpinned Donald Trump’s victory in November’s presidential election.

Now close allies, President Trump has appointed Musk to slash the federal budget and workforce. As head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), Musk’s team has set about dismantling entire federal agencies, freezing spending and laying off thousands of civil servants.

It is unknown if the technical difficulties on X are connected to his work with the Trump administration. Other companies owned by Musk have faced a string of protests and attacks in recent weeks, prompted by his cutbacks with Doge and his growing influence with Trump. Sales of Tesla have plunged in Europe, and showrooms for the electric car company have been targeted by activists in the US.

Musk launched sweeping job cuts at X after his takeover, slashing 80 per cent of the workforce. He was later moved to rehire some key staff as the platform developed technical difficulties.

Musk has blamed a cyberattack for technical issues with the website before. When a conversation between the tech billionaire and Trump was beset by glitches and the platform repeatedly crashed last

summer, Musk claimed that the site was under attack, suggesting it “illustrates there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what Donald Trump has to say”.

A campaign launch event on X with the Republican governor Ron DeSantis in 2023 was also plagued by technical difficulties.

The Times