The social media world is buzzing today as users react to the fact that X has been down. While the platform is currently accessible, it has been down for most of the day, with users claiming they are unable to access it.
Enough users have regained access for #TwitterDown to start trending on the platform, although that is no longer the social network’s name. Down Detector reports that an outage spiked this morning between 5:30 AM and 6:30 AM ET.
Although X seems to have been mostly restored now and is currently accessible, questions are rising about what caused this unexpected blackout. Elon Musk recently offered context.
Elon Musk recently gave an update on why X experienced an outage today (Photo by Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
Elon Musk has an answer for the X outage
The social media world hasn’t experienced a major network outage of this magnitude since the Meta Platforms (META) blackout of 2021 during which Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were inaccessible for hours.
While the X outage seems to be over, the dust is still settling from the unexpected meltdown which included “ two more prolonged spikes, denoting more significant outages, later in the morning.”
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At roughly 1:25 PM, Musk provided an answer to the question many users were likely asking. Responding to a post that speculated X had been attacked, Musk cites “a massive cyberattack against X” as the reason and implies that it is still going on.
“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” he states. “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
The post ends with Musk, somewhat ambitiously stating that his team is “tracing” the attack, providing no other context as to who or what he believes may be responsible for the alleged X cyberattack.
When X experiences a major technical difficulty, Musk is often quick to claim the company is under cyberattack.
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When listeners reported trouble accessing an X livestream of his interview with U.S. President Donald Trump in August 2024, he attributed it to a Distributed Denial-of -Service (DDoS) attack, a cybercrime aimed at making a digital network inaccessible.
However, no proof of any such attack has been determined since then.
Details are still emerging but X is back to operating
Since his post about the alleged cyberattack, Musk hasn’t provided any updates regarding it. But he has posted a few more times on unrelated matters, indicating that the network has been fully restored and is not experiencing any further disruptions.
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Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, shared her insights on the X outage, stating “It’s difficult to be certain, but given the pattern of three observed outages, a denial service attack targeting X’s infrastructure can’t be ruled out.” She notes that the recent outage is one of the longest on record for the platform.
A recent update from TechRader states that the U.S. is down to only 4,000 outage reports after seeing as many as 36,000 only a few hours ago while in the UK, reports have fallen to 458,000.
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