Elon Musk Claims Twitter Outage Was Due to “Massive” Cyber Attack

Elon Musk says X (formerly Twitter) is the victim of a cyber attack that has left the social media network experiencing several outages. Users of the former Twitter noticed they had problems logging into the application early Monday morning. While X/Twitter would eventually come back online, it went offline again and again throughout the day. Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has clarified what’s happening to the platform, insisting that while X is always the target for cyber attacks, this latest attempt is using a great amount of resources, and may even be coming from out of the country.

“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏,” Elon Musk wrote on X to his more than 219 million followers. “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 …” The post was made at 1:25 p.m. ET and there has yet to be a follow-up post providing evidence of cyberwarfare, or who could be behind the attacks.

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According to the website monitoring service Downdetector, complaints of X/Twitter being down started around 5:30 a.m. ET on Monday, March 10th. Once that downtime cleared up, more outages popped up around 9:30 a.m. ET, with a third outage occurring around 11:00 a.m. ET

After being purchased by Elon Musk in October 2022, X has undergone several changes, including changing its name from Twitter to X. Another recent change was public likes being hidden, which means users will no longer be able to see who likes one another’s Tweets (or posts). Like counts still appear, and the poster will still be able to see who liked their Tweet, but now the general public won’t be able to click on a Tweet and see who is doing the liking. According to the company, the decision was made “to better protect your privacy.” 

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