The NFL’s free agency period officially kicked off on Monday as the league’s legal tampering phase began, allowing players to begin discussions with teams and negotiate contracts. However, fans struggled to stay up to date with the latest moves as X encountered intermittent outages throughout both the morning and afternoon. CEO and owner Elon Musk has offered a pretty alarming explanation for the disruption.
In a social media post on Monday afternoon, Musk confirmed that X was experiencing outages and attributed them to what he described as a “massive cyberattack,” which he suggested was orchestrated by a “coordinated group” or possibly 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 reported by Ben Axelrod of Awful Announcing, the platform “initially suffered an outage overnight, with thousands of users reporting issues early Monday morning. Although services were briefly restored, the site and app went down again just before 10 a.m. ET, with more than 40,000 users reporting problems, as per DownDetector.com.”
As a result, several top NFL insiders turned to alternative social media platforms to break news on one of the busiest days of the league’s offseason.
Unsurprisingly, the situation was a major blow for Musk and X, sparking widespread reactions across social media.
“Here’s your biggest problem: Because you lie so much, nobody should believe you here,” former congressman Joe Walsh wrote in a post on X.
“It would have to be enormous,” another user commented.
“Musk can’t keep X operational, but his team now has access to essentially all U.S. workers’ sensitive personal information,” someone else noted.
“It was probably a couple rowdy teenagers that desperately want you to log off,” another person joked.
“Sabotaging X on the start of NFL free agency is savage,” one more user added.
By the afternoon, the platform had gradually returned to normal functionality, though the outage was obviously quite concerning.
