Thousands of social media users reported outages on Elon Musk’s X throughout the day on Monday, which the billionaire attributed to a “massive cyberattack.”
More than 40,000 users reported a crash on the app by 10 a.m., after reports had started pouring in at 6 a.m., according to DownDetector.com.
The complaints died down for an hour or so, but jumped again Monday afternoon, when more than 25,000 users said their app was down, according to the crash-tracking site.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk wrote in a post on the social media platform.
“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,” he continued, adding that X was tracing the source.
The app continuously buffered as it tried to load news and memes, and displayed an error message: “Posts aren’t loading right now.”
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Being under attack is run of the mill for all brands on the Internet,” Laurence Minsky, professor at Columbia College Chicago’s school of business, told The Post, “but going down repeatedly in one day is unusual.”
Sites are under attack all the time – but larger, more sophisticated firms like X are usually prepared for them. The length and ongoing nature of the alleged cyberattack is unusual, Minsky said.
Other experts said the repeated crashes could still be a run-of-the-mill occurrence.
“It could also just be some service going down due to ‘natural causes’ so to speak. It happens,” Jeremy Blackburn, computer science professor at Binghamton University and social media expert, told The Post.
Frustrated users quickly turned to Threads, a rival app launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta in 2023, to ask others whether they were experiencing the same glitches.