Elon Musk’s social media platform X, was inaccessible to thousands of users on Monday morning, over alleged cyberattack.
A CNBC report revealed that nearly 40,000 users reported problems with the platform around 10 a.m. ET, according to the analytics platform Downdetector which gathers data from users who spot glitches and report them to the service.
When X resumed operations, Musk disclosed that the platform had suffered a massive cyberattack, noting that it was done with a lot of resources.
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He wrote,
“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. Tracing.”
Despite Musk’s claims, no independent evidence has emerged to confirm the cyberattack. However, given X’s size and Musk’s growing prominence, especially under President Donald Trump’s second administration, it’s plausible that the platform could be a target.
Musk alluded to this after he responded to an X user who wrote “They want to silence you and this platform”. He responded with “Yes”.
This is not the first time X has suffered a major outage. The platform has experienced several large-scale outages since Musk’s takeover. Users reported problems with the platform in December 2022 and with the site’s desktop app in July 2023.
Musk Urged to Crack Down on Bots
Following the outages suffered by X, Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) has urged Elon Musk to ban all bots on the platform, noting that he only wants to interact with humans.
He wrote,
“I think X should ban all bots. I only want to interact with humans here (not “Automated”). If someone uses Grok/GPT/DeepSeek to generate a tweet and copy and paste it here, fine. But API posting should be disabled.”
In a separate comment, the Binance founder noted that automated comments are annoying. “If I want to chat with bots, I got Grok in a private window here”, he added.
It is no news that X has a massive Bot problem that won’t just go away. Recall that in 2022, Musk threatened to walk away from his $44 billion bid to buy Twitter (Now X), accusing the company of refusing to give him information about its spam bot and fake accounts.
Lawyers for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO made the threat in a letter to Twitter that the company disclosed in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The lawyers wrote that Musk has repeatedly asked for the information since May 9, about a month after his offer to buy the company, so he could evaluate how many of the company’s 229 million accounts are fake.
Twitter’s former CEO Parag Agrawal said that Twitter has consistently estimated that fewer than 5% of its accounts are spam. But Musk disputed that, contending in a tweet, without providing evidence, that 20% or more are bogus.
Musk, who said “We will defeat the spam bots or die trying” before he purchased Twitter in 2022, disclosed in 2024 that a “system purge” of bots and trolls was underway and X Corp. would trace the people responsible for such accounts and bring “the full force of the law to bear upon them.”
Notably, Musk has floated several solutions, including requiring new users to register a credit card with a small fee to deter mass bot creation. As X continues to battle outages, cyber threats, and bot-related fraud, the effectiveness of Musk’s proposed countermeasures remains to be seen.