Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and head of X, claimed on Monday that his social media platform was targeted by a “massive cyberattack” originating from the “Ukraine area.”
“We’re not sure exactly what happened,” Musk told Fox Business Network host Larry Kudlow regarding the incident, which disrupted service for thousands of users.
“But there was a massive cyber attack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area,” Musk stated.
When asked about the platform's current status, Musk assured, “It’s up.”
His comments came after thousands of users reported experiencing outages on X, formerly known as Twitter, throughout the day on Monday.
According to Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, reports of disruptions surged around 5:45 a.m. Monday before temporarily subsiding. However, a second wave of outages persisted through midday, primarily affecting the mobile app.
Users attempting to post tweets encountered error messages stating that “something went wrong” and were prompted to reload the page.
Since taking over X, Musk has several times reported cyberattacks on the platform. In August of last year, Musk was set to hold an online event with Donald Trump on X, but the interview was delayed by technical difficulties.
Musk claimed at the time that the technical difficulties were caused by a “massive DDOS attack on X,” referencing a “distributed denial-of-service” attack in which hostile users try to overwhelm a system to cause chaos.
Some X users, however, had doubts about Musk’s claim and said they believed the problem was X’s technical capabilities, rather than an attack.
The tech problems echoed similar difficulties from May 2023, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched his Republican presidential bid on X and was repeatedly disrupted because the site’s servers apparently could not handle the surge in traffic.