Elon Musk Announces ‘Massive Cyberattack’ Causing X Outage

Thousands of people on Monday reported that the social media platform was down for them.

Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk listens as President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with House Republicans at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Washington on Nov. 13, 2024. Allison Robbert/Pool via Reuters

Tech billionaire Elon Musk on March 10 said that an outage impacting his social media platform, X, is being caused by a “massive cyberattack” that is ongoing.

On March 10, tens of thousands of reports were submitted to DownDetector saying users could not access the X app or website or they could not access posts.

In response, Musk wrote at midday: “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,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO wrote, adding that his company is “tracing” the attacks.

In a later interview with Fox News on the same day, Musk said that the attacks’ IP addresses in the X cyberattack were “linked to IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” The Epoch Times could not immediately authenticate Musk’s comment.

People on the platform first started reporting issues after 5 a.m. ET on March 10, according to DownDetector. After a brief period of time, the number of reports appeared to drop before picking back up again at around 11 a.m. ET.

DownDetector, in a post on the platform, wrote that it has seen more than 350,000 reports of a possible outage since 5:30 a.m. ET.

The outages appeared to be heaviest on both U.S. coasts. Downdetector.com said that more than 50 percent of problems were reported for the X app, while about 33 percent were reported for the website, according to its website.

Several Epoch Times staffers could not access their X accounts or posts on the platform earlier on March 10.

More than 10,000 people in the United Kingdom also reported an X outage earlier that day, according to DownDetector’s website.

In March 2023, when the platform was still named Twitter, it experienced a number 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 acquired X for $44 billion in 2022 before slashing the company’s workforce by around 80 percent. He later renamed the platform X.

The outage comes amid Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio having publicly sparred with Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski on Sunday after Musk said on X that the Ukraine war with Russia would be severely hampered if he turned off Starlink internet access in the Eastern European country.

On Sunday, Musk, who is currently a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, wrote that Starlink has served as the “backbone of the Ukrainian army” and asserted that “their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” He also said he wants peace for Ukraine and that he’s backed the country in its war effort by providing the internet service.

Sikorski responded to Musk by saying that Poland was paying for the internet service and claimed Musk was threatening Kyiv. The Trump administration and Ukraine’s leadership have been engaged in high-stakes talks about ending the conflict and a deal for continued support of Ukraine that also benefits the United States.

“Starlinks for Ukraine are paid for by the Polish Digitization Ministry at the cost of about $50 million per year,” Sikorski wrote to Musk. “The ethics of threatening the victim of aggression apart, if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers.”

Rubio wrote in response that Sikorski was “just making things up” and that “no-one has made any threats about cutting Ukraine off from Starlink.”

Meanwhile, X recently took down a network of Chinese Communist Party-linked accounts that had amplified attacks on Shen Yun Performing Arts after an Epoch Times investigation exposed thousands of fake and malicious accounts.

X did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment from The Epoch Times on Monday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.