Elon Musk Attributes X Platform Disruptions to Major Cyberattack

The social media platform X experienced multiple outages on Monday. Its owner, Elon Musk, publicly announced that it had been happening due to a powerful cyberattack.

According to CNBC, around 40,000 users reported experiencing issues with the platform around 10:00 am ET yesterday, as registered by the real-time outage monitoring website Downdetector. Nearly 28,000 spotted glitches at 11:30 a.m. ET, and about 22,000 also faced difficulties accessing the platform at 2:00 p.m. ET.

“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏,” wrote Musk on his X account. “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.”

The platform issue happened on the same day Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) rolled out GSAi, a proprietary chatbot to automate tasks at the General Services Administration (GSA), amid massive job cuts.

According to Reuters, cybersecurity specialists were skeptical regarding Musk’s declarations and what the billionaire meant about “a lot of resources” as the denials of service—the type of attack the platform X received—had been executed by individuals or small groups.

An anonymous source in the internet infrastructure industry told Reuters the social media network had been hit by multiple waves of denial of service throughout the day.

In an interview with Fox Business Network, Musk said that the cyberattacks came from IP addresses located in Ukraine. However, Reuter’s source, said that the rouge traffic linked to Ukranian IP addresses was “insignificant” and that a large amount of the malicious traffic attacking X was tracked back to IP addresses in the United States, Brazil, Vietnam, and other regions.

Musk had previously backed President Donald Trump criticizing Ukraine’s fighting strategies against Russians and said on Sunday that their front lines “would collapse” without his Starlink satellite internet service.