Elon Musk says X.com was hit by a 'massive cyberattack' that disrupted the platform for hours

The outage coincided with a significant dip for bitcoin that saw the world's leading crypto fall to under $80,000.

Elon Musk has said that a major outage that disrupted his social media platform X for several hours on Monday was the result of a “massive cyberattack.”

The outage comes as a significant dip for bitcoin saw the world’s leading crypto fall to under $80,000.

According to Downdetector, almost 40,000 people reported that X was down at around 2pm UTC. These reports then fell before spiking to over 17,000 an hour later.

After users across the globe reported issues with the platform, Musk confirmed in a post on x that a large-scale cyberattack had caused widespread service disruptions.

“They tried very hard, but to no avail,” he said of the hackers.

“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.”

Hacking group Dark Storm has reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack. The group has previously warned it would target countries that support Israel.

The group’s statement, shared on a social media channel and translated by researchers at cybersecurity firm Group-IB, reads: “We will carry out cyberattacks on the economic and military centers of the countries that support the Israeli regime. We will continue our attacks until the complete withdrawal of support for Israel.”

Meanwhile, while X struggles, data on CoinGecko shows the price of bitcoin (BTC) is also performing poorly, as it dropped to $78,313, down 27.9% from its all-time high back in January.

It’s also down 13.5% since Donald Trump announced the creation of a US strategic BTC reserve last Thursday.

Variety reports that X’s last major outage was on August 9, 2024. At 12:16 am UTC on this date, BTC reached over $62,000 before dropping to around $60,000 throughout the day.