In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night, influencers, pundits, and random posters lit up social media platforms like X, Bluesky, and Instagram with conspiracy theories about the attack and the alleged shooter.

Both left and right-wing accounts claimed, without evidence, that the attack was staged.

President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and dozens of other high-profile administration officials and journalists were attending the dinner at the Hilton hotel in Washington, DC, when a suspect, later identified by media reports as Cole Tomas Allen from California, allegedly ran past security towards the event. He was detained by law enforcement while the president and vice president were evacuated. Police said that they believe Cole acted alone, but did not expand on who his intended target was or what his motive may have been. “We believe the suspect was targeting administration officials,” acting attorney general Todd Blanche told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday morning.

On Bluesky, which has a predominantly left-leaning user base, many people simply wrote the word “STAGED” over and over again, echoing the response to the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024.

On X, many claimed the shooting was staged as a way to bolster support for Trump’s plan to build a new ballroom in the White House. The president referenced the ballroom in a press conference after the incident and a Truth Social post on Sunday morning. Many prominent online Trump boosters echoed the need for the ballroom, including far-right podcaster Jack Posobiec, Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik, and Tom Fitton, the right-wing activist who runs Judicial Watch.

Their quick response, conspiracy theorists claimed, was evidence of a coordinated campaign following the shooting. “Is this another staged event,” one X user asked in a post that has been viewed more than 5 million times.

Other social media users who claimed the incident was staged pointed to a Fox News clip that featured the station’s White House correspondent Aishah Hasnie speaking from the Hilton hotel. Hasnie told viewers that prior to the shooting, press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s husband allegedly told her “you need to be very safe,” before the call was cut off.

“Fox News just cut one of their reporters off as they seemed to indicate the shooting was a pre-planned false flag,” one X user wrote in a post that has been viewed more than 2 million times. Hasnie later clarified in an X post that her cell service had cut out in a location with notoriously bad service, adding: “He was telling me to be careful with my own safety because the world is crazy. He was expressing his concern for my safety.”

“I don’t want to be fomenting conspiracies,” wrote Angelo Carusone, the chair and president of Media Matters, on Bluesky about the Fox News interview. “But I mean…this was super weird. Super weird.”

Leavitt herself was also the focus of conspiracy theories after she said “shots will be fired” in an interview ahead of the dinner, referring to the jokes Trump was scheduled to deliver. Following the attack, X users claimed the comment was “strange,” “sus,” or a “curious choice of words,” while sharing memes that suggested the shooting was staged. At least one mainstream outlet appeared to amplify the conspiracy theory as well, describing Leavitt’s comment as “eerie” and “bizarre.”

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XChat, the standalone app for accessing X’s messaging feature, is available to download now for iOS. X first suggested it would be stripping direct messaging from X in 2025, but at least for now, XChat is available in the original X app, the web and this new app.

Based on its launch video, the new XChat app offers many of the elements of modern messaging X had already introduced to its chats feature, like the ability to delete and edit messages, block screenshots and send disappearing messages. The new XChat app also supports video and audio calls, and X claims that all messages sent with XChat are end-to-end encrypted.

XChat will also be expected to be the home of any groups that formed around X’s Communities feature. The social platform recently announced that it was retiring Communities at the end of May, and suggested that XChat’s support for larger group chats could be a worthwhile alternative. XChat’s group chats can currently have 350 participants, but X plans to expand that number in the future.

Elon Musk’s original pitch after he rebranded Twitter as X, was to turn the platform into an “everything app,” where things like an algorithmic feed, messaging, job boards and even payments could exist side-by-side. A standalone messaging app seems like the exact opposite of that, but it might also reflect where X finds itself in 2026. The company is now a subsidiary of xAI, and xAI itself is part of SpaceX. Musk’s push into AI appears to be the going concern, and cloning something like WeChat might just be less important.

Utility technology company Itron, Inc. has disclosed that an unauthorized third party accessed some of its internal systems during a cyberattack.

The company states that it activated its cybersecurity response plan when detecting the activity last month, notified law enforcement authorities, and engaged external advisors to support the investigation and incident containment.

“On April 13, 2026, Itron, Inc. was notified that an unauthorized third party had gained access to certain of its systems,” the company says says in an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“The company activated its cybersecurity response plan and launched an investigation with the support of external advisors to assess, mitigate, remediate, and contain the unauthorized activity.”

The unauthorized activity has now been blocked, and the company stated that it has observed no follow-up activity.

Itron is a Washington-based public company that provides utility technology products and services for energy and water resources management.

The company is listed on NASDAQ, employs roughly 5,600 people, and in 2025 reported revenue of $2.4 billion. It serves 7,700 customers in 100 countries and manages 112 million endpoints.

Itron’s business is interwoven with critical infrastructure such as electricity grids, water distribution, and gas networks.

However, the company noted that in this case, business operations recorded no material disruption, and it does not currently expect any subsequent impact. Also, it expects a significant portion of incident-related costs to be covered by insurance.

Itron has also noted that the unauthorized activity did not extend to customers. However, it’s important to note that the investigation into the incident’s scope and impact is still ongoing.

No ransomware group has claimed the attack on Itron. BleepingComputer contacted Itron with a request for more details about the attack and will update this post once we hear back.

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