Elon Musk’s empire shaken: Tesla tumbles, X crashes amid US recession fears

Elon Musk faced significant setbacks on March 10, with Tesla’s stock plummeting by over 15% and his social media platform X experiencing major outages. The twin crises coincided with market panic and increasing criticism of Musk’s political ties to Trump’s administration. Additionally, Tesla’s declining sales and growing competition, particularly from China’s BYD, compound the challenges.

Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced massive outages throughout Monday morning that impacted thousands of users in the US and UK.

The outage came as platform monitor Downdetector said it had seen tens of thousands of reports from US users of technical issues affecting the platform.

Many users trying to access the platform and refresh feeds on its app and desktop site during Monday’s outages were met with a loading icon.

Elon Musk claims the outages stemmed from a “massive cyber-attack” that originated “in the Ukraine area”.

But the technology billionaire, who has been a frequent critic of Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelensky, offered no evidence to support the claim and did not say whether or not he thought state actors were involved.

Earlier, he posted on X that “either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved”.

The BBC has approached the Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC for comment.

“We’re not sure exactly what happened but there was a massive cyber-attack to try and bring down the X system with [Internet Protocol] addresses originating in the Ukraine area,” Musk said in an interview with the Fox Business channel.

Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, which monitors the connectivity of web services, said its own metrics suggested the outages could well be linked to a cyber-attack.

“What we’ve been seeing is consistent with what we’ve seen in past denial of service attacks, rather than a configuration or coding error in the platform,” he told the BBC.

He said the organisation has seen several major outages spanning more than six hours on Monday, “each having global impact”.

Elon Musk

“This is amongst the longest X/Twitter outages we’ve tracked in terms of duration, and the pattern is consistent with a denial of service attack targeting X’s infrastructure at scale,” he added.

Also on Monday, Musk called US Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, a “traitor” for going to Ukraine over the weekend. Kelly had said the visit “proved to me we can’t give up on the Ukrainian people”.