San Francisco, CA – Social media platform X suffered a major outage on Monday, affecting nearly 12,000 users, with owner Elon Musk attributing the disruption to a large-scale cyberattack.
“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,” Musk posted on X.
According to an internet infrastructure industry source, X was targeted by waves of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, beginning around 9:45 UTC. DoS attacks overwhelm systems with rogue traffic, causing disruptions.
Outage-tracking website Downdetector reported that over 40,000 users were affected at peak, though numbers later dropped.
Musk has not provided further details on the possible source of the attack, but cybersecurity experts warn that state-backed cyber threats are on the rise.