Elon Musk Has an Unhinged Theory for Why X Keeps Crashing
Elon Musk's social media company couldn't stay online Monday.
X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, was down for the better part of the day, leaving users and critics to question how involved Musk should be in paring down the federal government when his own history of trimming X had effectively rendered the site unusable.
Hours after the site first crashed, Musk took to his account to vaguely blame an outside force for the failure.
'There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏,' Musk posted when the site momentarily came back online. '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.'
But even if a large group coordinated the attack, Musk's decision to clear house at Twitter in 2022 would have been enough to hamper the site's functionality. Shortly after acquiring the site that year, Musk chose to lay off thousands of the site's employees in order to cut spending. That included staff in departments focusing on ethical AI, marketing and communication, search, public policy, wellness, and other teams, CNN reported at the time.
By January 2023, the company had shed roughly 80 percent of its employees, leaving it with fewer than 550 full-time engineers, according to internal records obtained by MSNBC. One anonymous outbound employee told the network that the massive slashes would leave the remaining staff spread incredibly thin, making it 'harder to maintain the service reliably.'
By Musk's own admission, te $44 billion investment lost 90 percent of its value in the months after he acquired it in October 2022.
Two groups immediately tried to take responsibility for taking down X Monday.
Users on Reddit shared screenshots of a site that they claimed X's web address temporarily redirected to. That page called itself 'Operation DreadNought,' and labeled itself as a part of Anonymous, the decentralized international hacking group.
'We are here to fight against the fascism that has taken root in America,' the page read. 'The Republican party, MAGA, Trump, and Musk are imbeciles who are drunk on power and get off on trampling down others. The American people are suffering for it. The World is suffering for it.'
Simultaneously, the pro-Palestine hacking group Dark Storm Team also claimed the DDoS attack in a public Telegram post.
But in an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Musk claimed—without providing proof—that the attack stemmed from a third entity.
'We're not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack that tried to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area,' he said.
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