Social media platform X experienced a significant outage on Monday, with nearly 12,000 users initially reporting disruptions. Owner Elon Musk attributed the issue to a large-scale cyberattack. "There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X. 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," Musk said in a post on the platform. Denial-of-service attacks A source in the internet infrastructure industry said X had been targeted by multiple waves of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks beginning around 9:45 UTC, as reported by Reuters. Denial-of-service attacks work by overwhelming a website with rogue traffic, causing disruption. While not necessarily sophisticated, these attacks can be highly effective in temporarily disabling online services. According to Downdetector, which tracks internet service disruptions, X was experiencing intermittent outages, affecting 11,745 users in the US as of 1:46 p.m. ET, reported Reuters. User-submitted data showed the number of reported outages briefly fell before surging again to 26,579, as per Reuters. At its peak earlier in the day, the outage had impacted around 40,000 users. (With inputs from Reuters)
