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, CNN reported.
“We’re not sure what exactly has 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 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 is 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 outage at 10 am. Outages reported on DownDetector began to drop around 2 p.m. ET and trails off throughout the afternoon.
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.
The Guardian reported: Elon Musk claimed on Monday that X was targeted in a “massive cyber-attack” that resulted in intermittent service outages that had brought down his social network throughout the day. The platform, formerly known as Twitter, had been unresponsive for many users as posts failed to load.
DownDetector, a website that monitors outages on various sites and platforms, showed thousands of reports of outage that initially spiked at about 5:45 am before returning to normal for a few hours. A second surge in reported outages carried on throughout midday, with the majority of them occurring on the company’s mobile app.
The richest man in the world did not provide any evidence for his claims. His post came in response to a cryptocurrency influencer who suggested the outage followed other opposition to Musk’s enterprises. Protests agents the so-called “department of government efficiency” initiative Muck leads and vandalism against Tesla dealerships have taken place throughout the previous week.
Engadget reported: X has been down for most of Monday. DownDetector saw a spike in outage reports from users between around 5:30 AM and 6:30 AM ET. There were two more prolonged spikes, denoting the more significant outages, later in the morning.
The platform’s owner, Elon Musk, claimed there was a “massive cyberattack against X” with either a “large, coordinated group and/or a country” behind the claimed assault. Musk didn’t provide any evidence, but experts told NBC News his assertions were plausible.