In a post that sounds suspiciously similar to the plot of recent Robert De Niro thriller Zero Day, Elon Musk blamed today’s widespread X outages on an unidentified cybercrime cell, or maybe even a whole country. “There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏,” the billionaire CEO posted on the platform this afternoon. “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 …”
According to the outage tracking site DownDetector (via CNN), the downtime began this morning around 6 a.m., with over 21,000 users reporting the outage. Things seemed to stabilize again 15 or so minutes later, before a small spike in reports at 9 a.m. and a much larger spike—over 41,000 this time—at 10 a.m. Some users have reported that the site won’t load, while others have seen an error message from content hosting service Cloudflare that reads, “Web server is returning an unknown error.” The issues appear to be global, and are most likely more widespread than the numbers above reflect. CNN notes that DownDetector is a self-reported site, so a user could be affected by the outage even if they didn’t log it.
This isn’t the first time Musk has blamed X’s frequent technical problems on the possibility of a cyberattack. “Given the prominence of this conversation, there was of course a 100% probability of DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks,” Musk posted in August when his conversation with Donald Trump on the platform was delayed by 42 minutes.
Of course, this very well may be a legitimate claim. Musk—and specifically his other company, Tesla—has been the subject of several global protests in recent weeks. (Bet you can guess why.) Activists occupied a Tesla showroom in New York and shot at one in Oregon. Around the world, Tesla chargers have been burned and spraypainted with Nazi symbols. “Nobody voted for Elon Musk,” protesters chanted in New York, where at least one sign read, “Send Musk to Mars Now!!” per The New York Times.
But the motivation behind those protests—namely, Musk’s gutting of the federal government via his unelected DOGE cronies—is the same thing the CEO did to Twitter after he acquired the platform in 2022. In total, Musk laid off 3,500 members of the company’s workforce, or about 80% of the site’s existing staff, per CNN. Sometimes, when you mass-fire everyone whose job it was to keep the lights on, stuff just breaks.
