Tens of thousands users in the US and UK reported technical issues affecting the platform on Monday
Elon Musk has suggested a “massive cyber attack” on his social media site X originated from Ukraine.
Tens of thousands users in the US and UK reported technical issues affecting the platform on Monday, according to Downdetector, which tracks website outages.
In an initial post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk said that “a large, co-ordinated group and/or a country” was involved in the attack.
“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” he wrote. “Either a large, co-ordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing…”
In an interview with Fox Business Network later on Monday, the billionaire said he was “not sure exactly what happened” but that the attack came from IP addresses “originating in the Ukraine area”.
More than 40,000 US users reported outages this morning, along with at least 8,000 UK users.
Downdetector said that 56 per cent of problems were reported for the X app, while 33 per cent were reported for the website.
Elon Musk flashes his t-shirt that reads "DOGE" to the media as he walks on South Lawn of the White House, in Washington, Sunday, March 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Elon Musk flashes his t-shirt that reads DOGE to the media as he walks on South Lawn of the White House (Photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
It comes as the Trump administration, which Musk is part of, continues to push Ukraine to reach to a ceasefire with Moscow to end the war.
On Sunday, Musk, who runs Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) said the Ukrainian army’s “entire front line would collapse” without his Starlink internet service.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he is willing to sign a minerals deal with the US, which would establish a joint fund from the sale of Ukrainian minerals.
Nicholas Reese, an expert in cyber operations from the Centre for Global Affairs in New York University’s School of Professional Studies, said the likelihood that a state actor was behind the X outages “doesn’t make a lot of sense” given their short duration – unless it was a warning for something larger to come.
“There are kind of two types of cyber attacks – there are ones that are designed to be very loud and there are ones that are designed to be very quiet,” he said.
“And the ones that are usually the most valuable are the ones that are very quiet. Something like this was designed to be discovered. So to me that almost certainly eliminates state actors. And the value that they would have gained from it is pretty low.”
Reese added that it is possible that a group was trying to make a statement by causing X outages, but such a temporary outage “is not much of a statement to me”. “It’s only really a statement if there is some kind of follow on action, which I would not rule out at this point,” he said.
Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, which monitors the connectivity of web services, told the BBC that its metrics suggested the outages could be linked to a cyber-attack.
“What we’ve been seeing is consistent with what we’ve seen in past denial of service attacks, rather than a configuration or coding error in the platform,” he said.
The organisation had seen several major outages spanning more than six hours on Monday, “each having global impact”, he added.
“This is amongst the longest X/Twitter outages we’ve tracked in terms of duration, and the pattern is consistent with a denial of service attack targeting X’s infrastructure at scale,” he said.
“X outage” was trending on rival social media platform BlueSky, with some posts welcoming users to the site and urging them to stick around.
Musk bought the former Twitter in 2022 and also serves as the chief executive of Tesla. He is running X while simultaneously having access to US government data systems – often wearing a shirt that says “tech support”.
In March 2023 the social media platform then known as Twitter experienced a bevy of glitches for more than an hour as links stopped working, some users were unable to log in and images were not loading for others.