X Outages Have Increased Since Elon Musk’s Takeover, ‘Massive Cyberattack’ Follows Mass Layoffs

Key Takeaways

• X suffered ongoing downtime throughout Monday.
• The incident is the latest outage under Elon Musk’s ownership.
• Twitter’s cybersecurity team was among the departments hit by mass layoffs after Musk’s takeover in 2022.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter and rebranded it as X, the social media platform has suffered four major outages.

Musk blamed the latest incident on a “massive cyberattack” against the site. But given that Twitter only went down once in the four years preceding his takeover, Musk’s mass layoffs may be partially to blame.

X Hit With Fourth Major Incident Under Musk

As reports of downtime on Downdetector surged on Monday, March 10, Musk declared: “there was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X.”

“We get attacked every day,” he stated, adding, “this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”

In an interview with Fox News later that day, Musk said the attack originated from servers in “the Ukraine area.”

The pro-Palestinian hacker group Dark Storm has claimed responsibility for the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. However, X has not yet provided details or attributed blame.

Monday’s incident is the fourth major outage to hit X under Musk.

In August 2023, Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for taking X offline in more than a dozen countries.

Several months later in December, the platform was hit by one of its biggest outages ever , prompting tens of thousands of reports on downdetector.

Another even more widespread incident occurred in August 2024, when Musk blamed a cyberattack for crashing X on the day he was scheduled to stream an interview with Donald Trump.

X vs. Twitter

While Musk has sought to pass the blame for X’s repeated crashes onto adversaries, his record compared to the previous management is poor.

Although Twitter was hit by a string of hacks in 2008 and 2009, it proved to be much more reliable throughout the 2010s.

With one major exception in October 2016, Twitter largely avoided the kind of cybersecurity incidents that have plagued X during this period.

Mass Layoffs Affect X Security Team

After he bought Twitter in 2022, Musk famously axed huge numbers of employees.

According to his account , the company’s headcount was reduced by roughly 80% in six months to just 1,500.

Departures included Lea Kissner, Twitter’s chief information security officer at the time.

While X has moved to bolster its security teams, the latest outage doesn’t reflect well on its cybersecurity.

As the former CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre Ciaran Martin observed on BBC Radio 4’s Today, DDoS is an unsophisticated attack vector that a company like X shouldn’t be falling victim to.

“I can’t think of a company of the size and standing, internationally, of X that’s fallen over to a DDoS attack for a very long time,” he stated.