The NFL’s free agency period officially began on Monday as the league’s legal tampering phase got underway, allowing players to start discussions with teams and negotiate contracts. However, fans found it difficult to stay updated as X experienced intermittent outages throughout the morning and afternoon.
Now, CEO and owner Elon Musk has confirmed the reason behind the disruption, and it’s rather alarming.
In a social media post on Monday afternoon, Musk acknowledged that X was facing outages and attributed them to what he described as a “massive cyberattack,” which he suspects was carried out by a “coordinated group” or potentially even a foreign nation.
“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. Tracing …” Musk said in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
As noted by Ben Axelrod of Awful Announcing, the platform “initially suffered an outage overnight, with thousands of users reporting outages early Monday morning. While services were restored for a few hours, the site and app went back down just before 10 a.m. ET, with more than 40,000 users reporting outages according to DownDetector.com.”
The outage posed a major challenge for sports reporters covering one of the NFL’s busiest days, prompting several to turn to Bluesky, a competing social media platform, to share breaking news.
“Well guess we will break news here today,” NFL insider Dianna Russini wrote in a post on Bluesky.
“Fun day for an X outage. Anyway: Free agent TE Evan Engram, formerly of the Jaguars, is visiting the Broncos, source says,” NFL insider Ian Rapoport wrote in a post on Bluesky.
The disruption was significant enough to convince Washington Post NFL reporter Nicki Jhabvala to join Bluesky.
“Ok I finally did it. I’m here,” he said in his first post.
By late afternoon, X had largely recovered from the outages, but it’s still quite alarming that such an attack could hinder the social media platform like that.
