A “massive cyberattack” is causing disruptions to X, the platform’s owner and Trump senior advisor Elon Musk claimed Monday.
“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 wrote in a post on the social media platform. He added the company was “tracing” the source.
Users reported intermittent outages on the social media platform on Monday, according to outage tracker Downdetector. In 2022, Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion and made wide-sweeping cuts to its staff and changes to its content policies.
Since then, the billionaire Tesla CEO has endeared himself to President Trump and now plays a key role in his second administration. Musk, leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has brought crews of young tech workers to Washington, D.C., to slash government budgets and workforces.
But Musk’s rightward shift has caused massive backlash against the world’s richest man.
Shares of Tesla, his electric vehicle company, were down 14% on Monday. The stock has sunk more than 35% in the past month as sales slumped in Europe and investors feared his political activities were taking too much time away from managing his EV car company. Tesla has also been the focus of protests, with many taking to dealerships to call out Musk’s sweeping cuts.
Musk had a simple response to an X user who theorized that a mysterious “they” wanted “to silence you and this platform,” leading to the attack.
“Yes,” he said.
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