March 10 (UPI) — X, the social media app with more than 600 million users, suffered periodic outages on Monday as the result of a “massive cyberattack,” Elon Musk, the owner of the private company, said.
Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and named it X in May 2024.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against ,” Musk wrote in a post on X on Monday afternoon to his 219.5 million followers on 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.”
He didn’t provide additional details.
Service had been restored to most users after 1 p.m. EDT, according to Downdetector.com, a website that tracks interruptions in service for sites. As of 5 p.m., 1,454 users reported outages.
Problems with X appeared to start around 6 a.m. EDT when about 23,000 U.S. users reported they couldn’t access the site.
The second outage occurred at about 10 a.m. and affected 41,143, when more users were trying to access the site. X started to come back online for many roughly 45 minutes later, according to NBC News and Variety.
The site had another major outage shortly before 1 p.m. that affected 36,064 users.
The biggest outage reports were in major U.S. cities, including New York City, Boston, Los Angeles and Phoenix, according to tom’s guide.
X has not publicly commented what was causing the intermittent problems Monday, and Musk didn’t comment until 1:25 p.m. Musk, who has been appointed by President Donald Trump to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, did post frequently on other matters.
The last major outage for X was in August 2024, when 66% of users reported experiencing problems with the app, website and server connection.
In February 2023 an outage lasted for several hours.
In August 2024, when his conversation with Trump on X started 42 minutes late, Musk said there was a “probability” of an attack.
X.com had 611 million monthly users worldwide as of April 2024, according to Statistica.com. X was the 12th most popular social media app, with Facebook No. 1 at 3.07 billion.
Musk, who is the richest man in the world worth $319.6 billion according to Forbes, also is CEO of Tesla. The publicly traded auto automotive and clean energy company declined 15.43% from Friday and is down 41.43% year to date in a wide. Musk also runs SpaceX, which is a private company.