X (formerly Twitter) suffered major outages. Elon Musk claims a cyberattack from Ukraine, but experts suggest a botnet. The incident adds to Musk’s ongoing challenges.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X, previously known as Twitter, faced significant disruptions on Monday, impacting thousands of users across the US and UK. The outages prevented users from accessing the platform and refreshing their feeds on both the app and desktop site, with many encountering a loading icon.
Downdetector, a platform monitoring service, reported a surge in user-reported technical issues, with tens of thousands of reports originating from the US. The UK also saw over 8,000 outage reports shortly before 14:00 GMT, following an earlier spike in the morning. Connection problems persisted for some users into the afternoon.
Musk’s Cyberattack Claims
Elon Musk attributed the outages to a “massive cyber-attack” supposedly originating “in the Ukraine area.” He stated this in a post on X, claiming that “either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.” Musk reiterated this claim in an interview with Fox Business, stating that the attack involved IP addresses from Ukraine. However, he has not offered concrete evidence to support this claim.
Expert Skepticism
Cybersecurity experts have expressed skepticism regarding Musk’s claims about the attack’s origin. Kevin Beaumont, a security researcher, noted that the attack involved IPs from worldwide, specifically identifying it as a Mirai variant botnet comprised of compromised cameras. He stated that while he is not sure who is behind the attack, it “Smells of APTs — advanced persistent teenagers.”
Allan Liska from Recorded Future also pointed out that even if the IP addresses originated from Ukraine, they were likely compromised machines controlled by a botnet, potentially operated from anywhere in the world.
DDoS Attack
Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, indicated that their metrics suggest the outages could be linked to a cyber-attack. He stated that they observed patterns consistent with denial of service attacks, as opposed to internal errors within the platform’s configuration or code. Netblocks tracked major outages lasting over six hours, each causing global impact, marking one of the longest X/Twitter outages they’ve monitored.
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack involves overwhelming a website with internet traffic to render it inaccessible. Musk has previously claimed that X has been targeted by DDoS attacks, although these claims have not always been verified.
Controversies and Context
The outages occurred amid other controversies involving Musk. He has been critical of Ukraine and its President, Volodymyr Zelensky. On the same day as the outages, Musk called US Senator Mark Kelly a “traitor” for visiting Ukraine, which further fueled the controversy.
In March 2023, the platform, then known as Twitter, experienced glitches that disrupted link functionality, logins, and image loading.
Expert Analysis of the Attack
Nicholas Reese, an adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, said it’s not possible to definitively verify Musk’s claims without seeing technical data from X, and the likelihood of them releasing that is “pretty low”. Reese said the likelihood that a state actor is behind the outages “doesn’t make a lot of sense” given their short duration — unless it was a warning for something larger to come.
He added that the temporary outage “is not much of a statement to me” unless there is some kind of follow on action.
Broader Issues for Musk
The X outages add to a series of challenges faced by Musk’s various ventures. Recently, a SpaceX rocket exploded mid-flight, and Tesla dealerships have been targeted by protests. Tesla’s stock price also experienced a decline.
Sources: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62x5k44rl0o
https://apnews.com/article/x-musk-twitter-outage-california-0268a8b035aaa277c0287e7c82b6081e
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/10/elon-musk-cyberattack-x-outages