Why X Keeps Crashing: Cyberattacks or Musk’s Cost-Cutting?

Social media site X (formerly Twitter) experienced intermittent outages on Monday, which owner Elon Musk attributed to an “unusually powerful” cyberattack.

“We get attacked every day, but this was accomplished with many resources. Either a large, organized group and/or state actor is involved,” Musk tweeted on X earlier Monday.

But cybersecurity professionals are less certain. Security researcher Kevin Beaumont, writing on Bluesky, stated the attack had been conducted via a variant of the Mirai botnet—a popular malware that takes over compromised IoT devices such as cameras and routers to conduct attacks.

The Global Impact

The outage affected users across multiple countries, including Kenya, early last evening.

According to Downdetector, there were three distinct waves of disruptions:

• Morning Peak (10 a.m. ET): 39,021 U.S. users affected.
• Afternoon Spike: Widespread outages are reported globally.
• Evening Disruptions: More users lost access before service gradually stabilized.

Later, though, Musk claimed in an interview that the cyberattack originated from Ukraine. However, Beaumont and other cybersecurity analysts dismissed him, saying that the attack involved IP address entries from multiple countries, including the United States, Vietnam, and Brazil.

Beaumont further suggested that the attack might have been carried out by ‘advanced persistent teenagers,’ skilled but malign hackers rather than a nation-state.

Is X’s Shrinking Workforce Making It More Vulnerable?

Since Musk took control back in 2022, X has had to work with an extremely slim staff, barely above 2,000, compared to 7,500 before. The firings included the following:

• Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) – Prevent outages and stabilize the system.
• Cybersecurity – Protect from cyberattacks, including DoS attacks.
• Data Center –

  Maintain infrastructure and prevent overloading.

With fewer specialized engineers, cyberattack recovery capabilities also decreased for X. Outages are increasing and some experts have gone so far as saying that the platform’s architecture may not withstand heavy-duty attacks or surges in traffic anymore.

Denial-of-Service Attacks: A Known but Preventable Threat

DoS attacks similar to the one experienced by X are not necessarily sophisticated; however, they can cause major disruptions. DoS attacks work by sending rogue traffic to a platform that will then become inaccessible for any legitimate users.

• Usually Executed by Hackers, Not Governments: “There was a large-group-or-a-country Assault” was how Musk described it, but actually, the majority of large-scale DoS attacks are historically performed by small, independent hacker groups.
• There Are Preventive Measures: With sufficient staff for these attacks to be countered, cybersecurity teams can intervene by monitoring better, filtering more astutely, and having a response strategy in place.
• Mirai Botnet is Old: The malware was active in 2016 and normally larger companies with robust security systems are able to ward it off.

How Other Platforms Handle Cyberattacks

The alternative major social media platforms have adopted various security measures to handle similar attacks like the one on X:

• Meta (Facebook and Instagram) utilizes an AI-driven threat detection and automated mitigation tooling system to neutralize real-time DoS attacks.
• TikTok uses redundancy mechanisms in global data centers to disperse traffic and prevent overload.
• LinkedIn (Microsoft) has DDoS scrubbing centers that filter out malicious traffic toward its platform.
• Reddit utilizes a robust cloud-based defense to absorb traffic spike volumes to preempt botnet attacks.

With huge investments in cybersecurity teams, infrastructure resilience, and proactive monitoring, these social media platforms attempt to minimize any large outages. In contrast, X can face higher risk due to the reduced workforce and aged infrastructure.

Is Cost-Cutting Making X an Easier Target?

Given that fewer engineers are monitoring network traffic, and the security team has been downsized, X could be more susceptible to attacks than it was before. The question then:

Is the cost-cutting measure by Musk affecting the resilience of the platform?

What’s Next for X?

With an aggressive approach toward cutting expenses, Musk has jeopardized user trust with outages and security failures. If X is not able to figure out its stability issues, advertisers and users may leave.

Given the security concerns, Musk is at a point of decision:

• Will he invest in infrastructure and security teams to prevent future failures, or
• Will he choose to allow continued outages that further tarnish X’s reputation and reliability?

As it stands, X is precariously positioned, and, without some meaningful reinvestment, further outages would seem almost inevitable.

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