(NEXSTAR) — Amid intermittent outages to X on Monday, owner Elon Musk says the social media platform was hit by "a massive cyberattack" that "still is" occurring.
"We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources," Musk wrote on X shortly before 1:30 p.m. ET. "Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved."
The issues appeared to start early Monday morning, with two subsequent outages reported by users.
Downdetector data shows roughly 22,000 user-reported issues with X around 6 a.m. ET. Outage reports quickly dropped off, before spiking again at around 10 a.m. ET.
During that service interruption, X web users encountered a message reading, "Something went wrong. Try reloading." A button to retry also appeared, prompting a spinning blue circle that reverted to the same message after a few seconds. Users reported similar problems with the app version of X.
Issue reports on Downdetector spiked to more than 40,000 during that interruption. Shortly before 10:30 a.m. ET, however, X appeared to be back to normal with user issue reports on Downdetector starting to decline.
The web version of X was accessible again by around 1:30 p.m. ET, while user-reported issues on Downdetector have been declining since around 12:45 p.m.
It's not possible to definitively verify Musk's claims without seeing technical data from X, and the likelihood of them releasing that is “pretty low,” said Nicholas Reese, an adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs in New York University’s School of Professional Studies and expert in cyber operations.
Reese said the likelihood that a state actor is behind the outages “doesn't make a lot of sense” given their short duration — unless it was a warning for something larger to come.
“There are kind of two types of cyber attacks — there are ones that are designed to be very loud and there are ones that are designed to be very quiet,” he said. “And the ones that are usually the most valuable are the ones that are very quiet. Something like this was designed to be discovered. So to me that almost certainly eliminates state actors. And the value that they would have gained from it is pretty low."
Reese added that it's possible that a group was trying to make a statement with causing X outages, but added that such a temporary outage “is not much of a statement to me.”
“It’s only really a statement if there is some kind of follow on action, which I would not rule out at this point,” he said.
In March 2023 the social media platform then known as Twitter experienced 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.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
