Tech billionaire Elon Musk has claimed that X (formerly Twitter) was hit by a “massive cyber-attack” on Monday, March 10, following widespread outages reported by users in the US and UK.
Musk, who has owned the platform since 2022, suggested that the attack was highly coordinated and potentially state-backed. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” he posted on X, hinting at the involvement of a “large, coordinated group and/or a country.”
The platform outage monitoring service Downdetector recorded tens of thousands of complaints from US users, while more than 8,000 reports were logged in the UK shortly before 14:00 GMT. Users attempting to refresh their feeds or access the site encountered persistent loading icons, signaling major technical disruptions.
Cybersecurity experts believe the outage is linked to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack—a tactic used to flood a website with excessive traffic, causing it to crash. “This is consistent with what we’ve seen in past DDoS attacks,” said Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, an internet monitoring service. He described Monday’s outages as among the longest X has experienced, lasting over six hours and impacting users globally.
X has not officially commented on the incident, and the full extent of the attack remains unclear. While Musk has previously claimed the platform was targeted by similar attacks, no independent verification has been provided. Investigations into the source and scale of the cyber-attack are ongoing.
