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X Outage: Musk Blames 'Massive Cyberattack' for Twitter Going Down

If you're wondering whether X is down -- it is, and has been on and off all day.

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Headshot of Katie Collins
Katie Collins Principal Writer
Katie is a UK-based news reporter and features writer. Officially, she is CNET's European correspondent, covering tech policy and Big Tech in the EU and UK. Unofficially, she serves as CNET's Taylor Swift correspondent. You can also find her writing about tech for good, ethics and human rights, the climate crisis, robots, travel and digital culture. She was once described a "living synth" by London's Evening Standard for having a microchip injected into her hand.
Katie Collins
2 min read
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X is up and down like a yoyo today.

 CNET

If you're still using X on a regular basis, you might have noticed that access to the social media platform has been intermittent today. The service (formerly known as Twitter) appears to have suffered several outages throughout Monday. At the time of writing, they're still ongoing.

The first outage seems to have occurred around 2.30 a.m. PT, according to DownDetector, with a further and more significant spike in reports occurring around 7 a.m. PT (Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis). The outage seemed temporarily under control, but the service still seems to be suffering.

"There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X," said company owner Elon Musk in a post on the platform. "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…"

Since Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion back in 2022 and fired around 80% of the company's employees, the platform has suffered a number of significant outages. 

More generally, a number of major internet outages have caused significant disruption over the past year, including when Slack went down just a few weeks ago. Perhaps the most dramatic disruption in recent times occurred due to last year's Crowdstrike outage, which resulted in chaos for flights, businesses and hospitals. In contrast, X going down is likely to have few repercussions.

If you're looking for somewhere else to go in the meantime, you could always join the tens of millions of Twitter quitters over on Bluesky. And for those who love endless multipart stories about random encounters with strangers, there's always Threads.