X faces cyberattack, Musk says after outage

Bengaluru/Mexico City — Social media platform X went down for nearly 11,000 users on Monday, which owner Elon Musk said was the result of a cyberattack.

“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, co-ordinated group and/or a country is involved,” Musk said in a post on the platform.

A source in the internet infrastructure industry said X had been hit by several waves of denial of service beginning about 9.45 am. The source spoke on the condition of anonymity as the person was not authorised to speak publicly on the matter.

Denial of service works by overwhelming targeted websites with rogue traffic. Such attacks are not necessarily sophisticated but they can cause significant disruption.

According to Downdetector, X was facing intermittent outages that had restricted 11,745 users in the US from accessing the platform, by 1.14pm ET (7.14pm).

The number of outage reports rose to about 26,579 after falling briefly, user-submitted data on the outage-tracking website showed. The number was as high as 40,000 earlier in the day.

Reuters