X is down again – Elon Musk confirms 'massive cyberattack' as former Twitter site hit by fourth outage today
X is having a bad day that appears to be getting worse
Hi there, Jake Krol – TechRadar's Managing Editor News in the US – stepping in for a bit. It's been roughly 40 minutes since Elon Musk's post confirming a 'massive cyberattack,' and it seems that X is bouncing back a little, at least for me on the East Coast of the United States.
The service, which has been working intermittently on browse and the iOS app, appears to be a back app, though it still takes a bit to load. DownDetector also shows a drop in reported outages as of 2:35 PM ET, at the show showing only 2,849 reports.
Elon Musk confirms "massive cyberattack"
Well, that certainly helps explains things. Elon Musk has taken to X (now seemingly down again for the fourth time today) to claim that "there was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X".
Musk says that while X gets attacked "every day", "this was done with a lot of resources". He added that "either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved", with the X CEO uncharacteristically careful not to specify who that might be.
A big DDOS attack (or Distributed Denial of Service) always seemed the most likely explanation given the multiple outages that X has experienced today, but it's now seemingly official. The only question now is how long this might go on for...
Some better news (for now)...
This most recent X outage has been the most prolonged of the day, but it appears to be recovering – the graph of Downdetector reports is showing a huge drop in both the US and UK.
In the US, we're now down to just under 4,000 reports (from a high of just under 36,000 just under an hour ago), while in the UK reports of X issues have dropped to a negligible 458, at the time of writing.
Of course, this also happened earlier today, only for X to go down even harder a short while later. But for now, it seems everyone is safe to go back and grill Grok about what on earth just happened...
What's causing the outage?
So far, X hasn't responded to requests for comment on what's causing its major problems today. The cybersecurity watchdog Netblocks says the outage "is not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering", which is a security screening process that can sometimes cause slowdown issues.
Some have speculated that the X outage has been caused by a DDOS attack. These are used by hackers to overwhelm a server with a huge amount of targeted traffic, so much so that it takes the service offline for many. While that's certainly possible, there's been nothing official to suggest that's the case.
In the absence of anything official from X, it seems we can only wait and locate an alternative source of memes to fill our Monday afternoons...
Even Grok can't help us...
We now live in a world of omnipotent, all-knowing AI assistants, so surely they can help with simple outages? Sadly not, if they're using the same servers as X – I tried to ask Grok what was happening today, but all I got was the usual 'something went wrong' message.
Grok has been hitting headlines lately with a new standalone iOS app in some countries (including the US, Australia and India), along with an unhinged voice mode that might be the most terrifying thing I've seen in 20 years of tech journalism.
But like X itself, Grok is notably quiet today – with reports on Downdetector showing another huge spike in reported problems.
The longest outage of the day...
It might not have hit the Downdetector peaks of the second outage earlier today, but this latest X wobble is the longest of the day – it's now over the two-hour mark, which means the world's productivity has coincidentally hit a 2025 peak.
That's now over seven hours in total since the first reported problems earlier today, which easily overshadows former Twitter outages in the past like the one in 2022 when the world was denied its memes for only an hour or so.
Back then, that seemed like a long time for the site to be down. Of course, the X workforce has shrunk by about 80% since then, but it did at least go on a cybersecurity hiring spree late last year – and we imagine it's been a busy day for them.
Time to head to Bluesky?
Not surprisingly, many folks over on Bluesky are enjoying today's X outage and are looking back at the smoking remains of Twitter with a degree of schadenfreude.
Bluesky has managed to establish itself as a genuine X alternative, with the maker of the popular Tweetbot app (which was shut down after Twitter banned third-party apps) recently announcing that it's making an iOS and Mac app for the platform that's aptly called Phoenix.
Some Bluesky fans have noted (below) that it's been a particularly bad day for Elon Musk, with Tesla stock also down. And looking at Downdetector, the X problems don't seem to be easing...
'Something went wrong'
Ever the master of understatement, X is greeting many users (my US colleagues in particular) with error messages like 'something went wrong' or simply a blank screen.
Some have taken to (other) social media platforms like Reddit to exclaim that this is actually an improvement to their lives. But here in the UK, X is back (for me at least) with its usual mix of Elon Musk ramblings, AI-generated memes and Fessholes.
This latest outage has fallen short of the second one earlier today at around 10am ET / 2pm GMT, but it is still pretty widespread. There's still no official word from X on the cause of today's wobbles, but presumably Grok is working on it...
When did this latest X outage start?
This is very much a global X / Twitter outage, with reports of problems climbing fast in the US and UK from around 10.50am ET / 2.50pm GMT on the site Downdetector.
They've just hit a peak of 30,000 reports in the US, which is a massive outage. In the UK, reports have fallen in the past hour, but are still hovering at the 4,700 mark.
So, what's causing the problems? While there's been nothing official, some cybersecurity commentators suggest it may be a so-called DDOS (or Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks, where a flood of internet traffic overwhelms a server.
In other words, buckle up – because this could last a while...
