Editor’s Note: “Twitter: Breaking the Bird” follows the insider story behind the meteoric rise and eventual sale of the revolutionary app featuring the voices of the founders themselves. The four-part series airs on Sundays at 10pm ET/PT from March 9th – 30th.
New YorkCNN —
Elon Musk’s X was hit by waves of outages earlier Monday, which the billionaire claims was due to a cyberattack with IP addresses originating in Ukraine.
“We’re not sure exactly what happened,” Musk said during a Fox Business interview Monday afternoon. “But there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”
Musk did not give any further details about the origin of the attack, including whether he believes it was connected to the Ukrainian government. It is possible to mask IP addresses and make it seem as though the traffic is coming from elsewhere, and spoofing locations is often offered by hackers-for-hire.
According to outage tracking site DownDetector, the problems began around 6 a.m. ET when up to 20,538 users reported problems. The issues temporarily died down before nearly 40,000 users reported outages at 10 am. Outages reported on DownDetector began to drop around 2 p.m. ET and trailed off throughout the afternoon.
Many users on DownDetector said the platform wouldn’t load, and the outage appeared to be global, according to DownDetector’s international sites. During the Fox Business interview, which aired during the 4 p.m. ET hour, Musk said platform was working again.
DownDetector data is self-reported, meaning it doesn’t fully represent the outage’s scale. CNN has reached out to X, though the company doesn’t usually respond to press inquiries.
Musk posted on X early Monday afternoon that he believed “a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved,” though the source of motivation behind the attack wasn’t confirmed. Musk also replied “Yes” to a post on X suggesting people are trying to silence the billionaire and his platform, although no further details about the service disruption, including whether it was caused by a targeted attack, have been revealed.
Eric Noonan, CEO of cybersecurity provider CyberSheath, told CNN that it’s likely too early to tell if an attack caused the issues.
“One of the things that should always be taken with a grain of salt is any statements made in the short period of time, immediately after, or even in this case during an attack,” Noonan said.
Musk has a history of attributing technical snafus to cyberattacks. When his conversation with Donald Trump on X started 42 minutes late in August 2024, he said there was a “probability” of an attack.
“Given the prominence of this conversation, there was of course a 100% probability of DDOS attacks,” Musk posted on the social media platform at the time. DDOS stands for “distributed denial-of-service,” which involves overwhelming servers with fake traffic to cause service disruptions. But Florida Governor Ron Desantis’ presidential campaign announcement on X in 2023 was also marred by technical difficulties.
Ransomware attacks have been more common than DDOS attacks in recent years because they’re usually financially motivated, according to Noonan. DDOS, however, is typically used to cause a disruption, which also makes confirming the source of these types of attacks more difficult.
Musk implemented widespread cuts and major changes to X after acquiring the popular social media platform, then called Twitter, in 2022. He immediately laid off top executives and, within days of acquiring X, cut 3,500 people, or around half the platform’s workforce. He laid off 80% of the staff in total and required the remaining employees to return-to-office full time.
The platform has experienced a series of glitches and disruptions since the acquisition.
It’s been a tough day for the businesses owned by Musk, who is also the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). On Monday, Tesla shares fell 15% on Monday, erasing its gains since Trump’s November 2024 election.
