Three separate outages appeared to hit Elon Musk’s X social media site Monday, as the tech titan claimed it was suffering a “massive cyberattack.”
Thousands of reports of trouble accessing or using the site were first registered by Downdetector.com around 5:30 a.m. ET Monday. It took about an hour before those issues subsided.
Then, around 9:30 a.m., the issues appeared to flare up again, with as many as 40,000 outage reports detected. It again took about an hour for that incident to dissipate.
Finally, around 11:10 a.m., the issues cropped up again, according to Downdetector.
A representative for X could not immediately be reached for comment.
On Monday afternoon, Musk posted to X that there had been a “massive cyberattack” against the site.
“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk said. “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
Though he didn’t post any evidence of a cyberattack, experts said that the outage was consistent with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, a rudimentary but sometimes effective hacker tactic to overwhelm a website with traffic, effectively knocking it offline.
Isik Mater, the director of research at NetBlocks, a company that tracks global internet connectivity, told NBC News that X had suffered intermittent outages since Monday morning. While establishing a DDoS attack with certainty can be difficult, Mater said Musk’s claim was plausible.
“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 said. “It’s certainly one of the longest X/Twitter outages in our records.”
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