Share and Follow
Users of the X social media platform have reported several outages which owner Elon Musk says is the result of a cyberattack.
Complaints about outages spiked during the early hours of Tuesday AEDT, with more than 40,000 users reporting no access to the platform, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com.
“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, coordinated group and/or a country is involved,” Musk said in a post on the platform.
A source in the internet infrastructure industry told the Reuters news agency X had been hit by several waves of denial of service beginning about 8.45pm on Monday AEDT.
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.
X was facing intermittent outages according to Downdetector, restricting 11,745 users in the US from accessing the platform, as of 1.45pm ET on Monday (4.45am AEDT on Tuesday).
In March 2023 the social media platform then known as Twitter was hit with a bevy of glitches for over an hour as links stopped working, some users were unable to log in and images were not loading for others.
Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022 and renamed the platform X in July 2023.
