Elon Musk has claimed that his social media site X has been hit by a ‘massive cyber attack’ as a number of users have struggled to log into the platform.
The platform has been suffering from outages today (10 March) and Musk posted online about why he thinks this is.
He wrote: “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 …”
Thousands of users were reporting problems with the platform on the website Downdetector.com, with as many as 40,000 people reporting issues with X, formerly Twitter, by around 10am Eastern time.
When he claimed that X had been hit with a ‘cyber attack’, Musk was responding to a post which was complaining about ‘protests against DOGE’ (Musk’s controversial new role in the US government) and that ‘Tesla stores were attacked’.
This account was then theorising that Twitter being down for people was ‘the result of an attack’ from without rather than technical issues from within the site, leading Musk to quote their message and claim a ‘massive cyber attack’ had been launched and that it must be a large group or even a country.
Someone else replied to Musk saying ‘they want to silence you and this platform’, to which the billionaire replied ‘yes’.
Outages of this kind have happened before, in March 2023 the social media site suffered from a series of glitches which meant that links stopped working and some people couldn’t log into their accounts.
According to Downdetector.com, 63 percent of problems this time around were reported for the X app, while 33 percent were from people trying to access it through a web browser.
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Musk claimed it must be the work of ‘either a large, coordinated group and/or a country’ (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
The issue seems to have been a global one as users from various countries were reporting problems with accessing the social media platform.
SpyoSecure, a cybersecurity team that ‘tracks, exposes, and reports’ scammers, previously said X was the victim of a cyber attack.
It’s a dollop of technological trouble that Musk does not need, hot on the heels of the recent disaster of his failed SpaceX rocket launch.
The rocket blasted off from Texas but very visibly broke up over Florida during a test flight, disrupting over 240 flights as it ended up suffering a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’.
It was meant to land in the Indian Ocean, but with the failed test flight it’s a case of waiting for the next test to see if things get better.
Featured Image Credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images