Tesla Sites Firebombed, X Hit with Major Cyberattack as Musk Aims to Cut Wasteful Gov’t Spending

The social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, had a pretty bad day on Monday after users reported outages four times in one day.

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” owner Elon Musk wrote on X Monday afternoon. “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”

DownDetector, an outage tracking site, noted that the problem began at 6 a.m. Eastern on Monday with about 20,538 users reporting problems. The issues were temporarily resolved before another 40,000 users experienced problems accessing the site around 10 a.m. After that point, two more X outages took place before finally being resolved by late afternoon. 

Musk told Fox Business that he suspected the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack originated in Ukraine but did not provide strong evidence to back his claim.

“We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area,” he said.

DDoS attacks involve overwhelming servers with fake traffic to cause service disruptions, CNN reports. 

A pro-Palestinian hacker group Dark Storm Team claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a Telegram post. 

According to multiple reports, the group has been active since 2023 and previously targeted entities in Israel, NATO-aligned nations, companies, and has unconfirmed but “highly” likely links to Russia and “strong partnerships with other groups.”

Musk has faced heavy criticism for his role in slashing government waste by cutting the federal workforce through his role as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

As CBN News reported, in late February, panic and chaos ensued across the federal government after Musk emailed federal employees asking them to explain their recent work contributions by listing five accomplishments or face potential termination.

“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk wrote on X. 

The Office of Personnel Management informed agency leaders that their workers would not be required to respond by the deadline, calling the responses “voluntary.” 

The earlier conflicting directives led to anxiety and confusion among workers. Some were told to answer the request for a list of five things that they did last week, others were informed it was optional, and others were directed not to answer at all. 

President Trump backed the move saying, “I thought (the email)  was great because we have people that don’t show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government…So, by asking the question, ‘Tell us what you did this week,’ what he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?'”

Some of the president’s top officials told staff to ignore Musk’s directive. And Trump later clarified that personnel decisions would be up to each cabinet secretary.

More recently, about 80,000 federal health workers were offered a $25,000 incentive to leave their jobs, as part of DOGE’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal government. 

The offer was made to employees from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration. Workers have until 5 p.m. on Friday to agree to the separation offer, the Daily Mail reports. 

In addition to the cyberattack against Musk’s X on Monday, the tech mogul’s mission to save America from wasteful government spending is coming with a hefty personal price tag.

Share prices for his electric car company, Tesla, have dropped by over 46 percent since Trump’s second term began, and his AI company, Grok, is also down. 

Tesla appears to be taking the brunt of it with the CEO saying there have been “many attacks against our stores and offices.”

Multiple reports confirm that there have been violent attacks against Tesla showrooms and storage units. 

Even people’s personal Tesla vehicles have been targeted. 

Seattle fire officials are investigating an incident after four Tesla cyber trucks were set ablaze in a Tesla parking lot. 

Meanwhile, police in Oregon are working with the FBI to investigate gunshots fired at a Tesla dealership last week. 

That shooting came a week after federal prosecutors in Denver charged a woman in connection with vandalism against a Tesla dealership in Colorado, including Molotov cocktails being thrown at vehicles and the words “Nazi cars” spray-painted on the building.

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