Elon Musk claimed that IP addresses connected to a “massive cyberattack” on X, which caused significant outages throughout Monday, originated in Ukraine.
In an interview with Fox Business Network host Larry Kudlow, Musk admitted that they were still “not sure exactly what happened.”
“There was a cyberattack on X today, which shut it down and may have been foreign-sourced,” Kudlow said. “It’s a big story — you want to give us a moment on that?”
“We’re not sure exactly what happened,” Musk responded. “But there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”
Breitbart News’s Lucas Nolan reported that while “a group known as ‘Dark Storm Team’ claimed responsibility for the attacks” on the social media platform, this has “not been independently verified.”
Speculation about the cause of the outages began to circulate, with some users suggesting that X might be the target of a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks involve flooding a website or service with an overwhelming amount of traffic, rendering it inaccessible to legitimate users. A group known as “Dark Storm Team” claimed responsibility for the attacks on social media, but these claims have not been independently verified.
Around 6:00 a.m., the first outage on X occurred, with roughly 20,608 outages reported, according to Downdetector. At 6:17 there were 720 reports of outages on X, and outages on the social media platform appeared to have stopped until around 9:30 a.m.
At 10:02 a.m. there were roughly 41,143 reports of outages on X, according to Downdetector. At 10:32 a.m., this decreased to roughly 1,361 reports, and at 11:02 a.m., there were about 4,670 reports of outages.
Reports of outages on the social media platform then spiked again, with roughly 36,064 outages reported around 1:02 p.m. Around 1:32 p.m., there were approximately 3,455 reports of outages.
The social media platform appeared to once again experience another outage spike, with reports reaching 19,446 around 2:02 p.m. before dropping back down again.
In a post on X, Musk revealed that “there was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” adding that the social media platform gets “attacked every day. But this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk explained. “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
