Elon Musk claims X being targeted in ‘massive cyberattack’
By Michelle Chapman
FILE - Workers install lighting on an "X" sign atop the company headquarters, formerly known as Twitter, in downtown San Francisco, on Friday, July 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)
Hours after a series of outages Monday that left X unavailable to thousands of users, Elon Musk claimed that the social media platform was being targeted in a “massive cyberattack.”
“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources," Musk claimed in a post. "Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing …”
Complaints about outages spiked Monday at 6 a.m. Eastern and again at 10 a.m, with more than 40,000 users reporting no access to the platform, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com.
A sustained outage that lasted at least an hour began at noon, with the heaviest disruptions occurring along the U.S. coasts.
Downdetector.com said that 56% of problems were reported for the X app, while 33% were reported for the website.
In March 2023 the social media platform then known as Twitter experienced a bevy of glitches for over an hour as links stopped working, some users were unable to log in and images were not loading for others.
Skype users are scrambling to find an alternative after Microsoft shut down the pioneering internet phone service which let people make cheap long distance calls and chat with other users. Google Voice lets users make calls from a smartphone or a desktop web browser but it's only available to people in the U.S. Viber users can call phone numbers but can't get a number to receive calls. Zoom offers phone options too. You could get a number from a low cost virtual carrier or try other internet phone services. Microsoft says some Skype features will migrate to Teams, but its Teams Phone feature is only for businesses.