"My Twitter" Elon Musk blames X outages on massive cyberattack Will users ever abandon the Twitter brand? X outages suggest the answer is no. Ashley Belanger Mar 10, 2025 3:23 pm | 101 Credit: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV / Contributor | AFP Credit: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV / Contributor | AFP Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreAfter DownDetector reported that tens of thousands of users globally experienced repeated X (formerly Twitter) outages, Elon Musk confirmed the issues are due to an ongoing cyberattack on the platform."There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X," Musk wrote on 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."Details remain vague beyond Musk's post, but rumors were circulating that X was under a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack.X's official support channel, which has been dormant since August, has so far remained silent on the outage, but one user asked GrokX's chatbot that provides AI summaries of newswhat was going on, and the chatbot echoed suspicions about the DDOS attack while raising other theories."Over 40,000 users reported issues, with the platform struggling to load globally," Grok said. "No clear motive yet, but some speculate its political since X is the only target. Outages hit hard in the US, Switzerland, and beyond."As X goes down, users cry for TwitterIt has been almost two years since Elon Musk declared that Twitter "no longer exists," haphazardly rushing to rebrand his social media company as X despite critics warning that users wouldn't easily abandon the Twitter brand.Fast-forward to today, and Musk got a reminder that his efforts to kill off the Twitter brand never really caught on with a large chunk of his platform.While #MyX began trending on the platform alongside "My Twitter," the latter had much higher engagement, suggesting that many users still default to thinking of the service as Twitter. About 360,000 users posted about "my X," as more than a million panic-posted about "My Twitter.""Has anyone noticed that people are saying 'My Twitter' instead of 'My X'?" one X user, @VulFuru47, wrote, joking, "Did we just go through a great reset?"Musk began his Twitter rebrand in April 2023, confirming in a court filing that Twitter had merged with X Corp. and would no longer be known by its former name. But efforts to rebrand the social platform were not smooth, with the Twitter name remaining confusingly intermixed with X branding throughout the platform. It took more than a year, for example, to even redirect twitter.com URLs to x.com.In the years since, analysts called the rebrand a mistake, seemingly instantly harming brand loyalty. And users have debated in Reddit threads and blogs whether they'll ever refer to the platform as X, leading Musk to demand last year that users respect the rebrand. There have also been several reported exoduses of users since Musk's takeover, most recently after the US presidential election results in November pushed users in "droves" to ad-free X rival Bluesky, Forbes reported.For thousands of users who stuck with X or joined the platform through the rebrand, X failed to load Monday. In the past, X's Support channel has posted messaging explaining platform-wide issues, so it's possible more information will be posted there once the issues are resolved.Ashley BelangerSenior Policy ReporterAshley BelangerSenior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 101 Comments