Social Media X Frequently Crashes on Monday, Musk Claims to Face Large-Scale Cyber Attack
On Monday Eastern Time, the social platform X owned by Elon Musk experienced a large-scale outage. As of the time of writing, there have been three failures throughout the day, with user complaints exceeding 41,000 at peak times. The first reports of issues appeared at 10 AM Eastern Time. Musk stated that the incident was caused by a cyber attack, with attackers investing significant resources, possibly indicating a highly coordinated organization, and it may even involve a certain country
On Monday Eastern Time, the social media platform X, owned by Elon Musk, experienced a massive outage.
As of the time of publication, users reported that the platform had experienced its third outage of the day, and this may not be the last.
According to Downdetector data, the first reports of issues appeared at 10 AM Eastern Time on Monday, when X users in the United States and the United Kingdom were unable to access the platform normally, whether through the app or the website.
Although the issue was quickly resolved, X experienced two more outages, the most recent occurring at 2 PM Eastern Time.
On Monday, the peak number of outage reports for the X platform exceeded 41,000. Among these, 58% of users complained about app issues, 31% reported website failures, and 11% encountered server connection problems.
So, what exactly happened to X? Musk explained in a post on X:
“X is experiencing (and still experiencing) a large-scale cyber attack. We are attacked every day, but this time a significant amount of resources were deployed, possibly by a large, well-coordinated organization, and may even involve a nation.”
Reuters cited an anonymous source from the internet infrastructure industry, revealing that X faced multiple rounds of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The principle of a DDoS attack is to send a large amount of malicious traffic to the target website, causing the server to overload. Although such attacks are not complex, they are sufficient to cause widespread service disruptions.
Additionally, according to Bloomberg, X is in talks for a new round of financing, with a valuation potentially maintaining at $44 billion, the same price Musk paid for X in 2022. However, the negotiations are still ongoing, and the final financing terms may change