The world's richest man and X owner, Elon Musk, has confirmed a massive outage on the social media platform affecting millions of users, including Kenyans.
In a statement on Monday evening, Musk announced that a large-scale cyberattack had caused multiple periods of downtime, preventing users from viewing posts on individual accounts.
However, the businessman assured that efforts to restore normalcy were underway and that the team was working to trace the hackers.
According to Musk, while the platform frequently experiences cyberattacks, yesterday's incident was carried out with significantly more expertise, likely by a large, coordinated group.
“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,” Elon Musk disclosed.
He quoted a post by DogeDesigner, which stated, "First, protests against Doge. Then, Tesla stores were attacked. Now, X is down. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that this downtime is the result of an attack on X.”
During an interview with Fox News on the same day, Musk revealed that the massive cyberattack was intended to bring down the X system, with IP addresses traced to one of the European countries.
Complaints about the massive outage emerged on Monday at noon and again at around 8 pm, with thousands of users reporting that they were unable to access the platform.
According to Downdetector, 58 per cent of the complaints were related to the X application, 31 per cent to the platform’s website, and 11 per cent to server connection issues.
This is the second time X has experienced an outage since its acquisition by Elon Musk. In December 2023, the social media platform suffered a downtime that affected thousands of users globally.
The outage was reported minutes after 9 am, with preliminary investigations revealing that server problems were the cause. Despite the disruption, X Spaces remained functional.
A similar downtime was witnessed in July 2022, when users across Africa and Asia were unable to access their accounts for hours.
