Elon Musk says X targeted by ‘cyberattack’ after outage
Al Jazeera2 days ago
Elon Musk Blames 'Massive Cyberattack' for Outages at X
Above: Elon Musk departs the White House to attend a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on March 4, 2025. Image copyright: Bonnie Cash/UPI/Bloomberg/Contributor via Getty Images
The Facts
Elon Musk alleged that a "massive cyberattack" was responsible for intermittent outages on the X platform (formerly Twitter) on Monday.
According to Downdetector, which tracks outages at various sites and platforms, users of X first started experiencing problems at 5:30 am EST for roughly an hour, before further waves of outages were reported between 7:45 am and 1:15 pm.
Writing on the platform while outages were ongoing, Musk said: "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..."
The Spin
Narrative A
While it's not immediately clear who or what is behind the outages at X, Musk's recent actions have given him no shortage of enemies. Be it has involvement with Pres. Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, which has slashed thousands of federal jobs and funding to agencies including USAID, or his disparaging remarks about Ukraine, there are many people who would've liked to see this attack take place.
Narrative B
Despite Musk's claim that state actors were behind this attack, the evidence does not currently support that theory. State-backed attacks are often designed to go undetected. This was a showy attack, designed to generate attention, suggesting it was launched by a protest group with an axe to grind.