The social media platform X was blocked for nearly 12,000 users on Monday, and its owner, Elon Musk, stated that the outage was the result of a cyberattack.
“There has been (and continues to be) a massive cyberattack against X. We face attacks every day, but this time it was with substantial support, either from a large, coordinated group and/or a country,” Musk wrote in a post.
Cyberattack Causes Disruption
An industry source in internet infrastructure revealed that X had been affected by several service interruptions starting early in the morning.
The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, explained that the outage occurred when multiple websites targeted the platform by artificially increasing traffic. These types of attacks are not necessarily sophisticated, but they can lead to significant disruptions.
Service Interruptions Impact Thousands of Users
According to ‘Downdetector,’ X faced service disruptions, denying 11,745 users in the U.S. access to the platform. The number of reported disruptions rose to about 26,579, according to data submitted by users to the website that tracks outages.
Earlier in the day, the number of disruptions peaked at 40,000.
