Social media site X went offline this morning. The webpage wouldn’t load, and users trying to open posts in the app were greeted with a message saying: ‘Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault.’
Whose fault was it? Billionaire owner Elon Musk says he has the answer – a ‘massive cyber attack’.
‘We get attacked every day’, Musk said in a post on the platform, formerly known as Twitter.
‘But this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, co-ordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing …’
Tracker website Down Detector noted a spike in reported problems at around 9am this morning, with issues flagged by thousands of users.
More than 21,000 people reported issues with the platform, with over 10,800 in the UK. There were further reports across the world including in Australia, Italy and Canada.
‘TwitterDown’ has been trending in the UK, with more than 11,000 posts.
Dr Sina Pournouri, a lecturer in cyber security at Sheffield Hallam University told Metro: ‘Large platforms like X are always prime targets for cyberattacks.
‘However, in the case of today’s outage, the exact cause remains unknown. It could be something as minor as human error or as severe as a large-scale cyberattack, such as a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.
‘Human error, particularly during routine updates, is a common cause of system crashes.
‘A simple misconfiguration such as an incorrect setting in a firewall, load balancer, or server can disrupt connectivity or render services unavailable.
‘Regardless of who owns or manages these platforms, such incidents are always a possibility.’
Metro has approached X for comment.
Musk purchased X, formerly Twitter, for £34.5bilion in 2022.
He has been at the centre of some controversy as head of the Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The department, tasked with slashing federal spending, has drawn close to two dozen lawsuits after DOGE officials gained access to sensitive database.
Thousands of federal jobs have been cut, contracts cancelled and some sections of the government, such as the US Agency for International Development, shut down.
The Trump administration and Musk argue it was given a mandate to restructure the US government, however.
Since he was appointed to the role, protesters in the US have targeted Tesla stores across the country. Superchargers at a shopping centre in Massachusetts were set on fire earlier this month and ‘no Musk’ was painted onto a building. A man also fired a gun at a Tesla store in Oregon in February.
Musk owns around 13% of Tesla.
Last week there was another major outage in the UK when the Universal Credit website was down, leaving users infuriated.
A DWP spokesperson said: ‘Our Universal Credit login page is working normally after coming offline briefly this morning due to a systems update. Customers can now use the system as normal, and we apologise for any inconvenience.’
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