X, the social media site owned by Elon Musk, suffered several global outages on Monday, disabling thousands of users from accessing the site. Musk later intimated that a sophisticated cyberattack by a nation-state could be to blame.
On X, Musk wrote, “There was (still is) a huge cyberattack on X. We are attacked daily, but this was done with considerable resources. Either a large, organized group and/or a nation is behind it. Tracing.”
The outages first started at around 3 p.m., after which additional outages occurred at 7:30 p.m. and 8:45 p.m. As per online service outage-monitoring platform Downdetector, more than 40,000 users encountered issues, and 56% of the grievances were for issues with the X app, and 33% were for problems with the site.
The site went totally unresponsive during the outages and made it impossible for users to post content or load pages.
Since Elon Musk’s takeover of X previously Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, large-scale service disruptions have been fairly uncommon compared to other social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Yet Monday’s outage has been large enough to cause concerns about cybersecurity attacks on the platform.
