The NFL’s free agency period opened on Monday as the league’s legal tampering period began, allowing players to begin communicating with teams and brokering deals. However, fans struggled to get the latest information as X suffered intermittent outages throughout the morning and afternoon. Now, CEO and owner Elon Musk has confirmed the source of the outage.
In a post on social media on Monday afternoon, Elon Musk confirmed that X was struggling with intermittent outages and confirmed that it was the result of what he described as a “massive cyberattack” that he believes was done by a “coordinated group” or even a foreign country.
“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 website that was formerly known as Twitter.
As Ben Axelrod of Awful Announcing out, Musk’s social media app “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.”
This outage caused quite a few problems for sports reporters trying to share breaking news on one of the NFL’s busiest days, and it led several of them to begin posting their updates on Bluesky, a competing social media app.
“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 X outage was even enough to convince NFL reporter Nicki Jhabvala of the Washington Post to sign up for Bluesky.
“Ok I finally did it. I’m here,” he said in his first post.
X seemed to rebound from the issues late in the afternoon.