Billionaire entrepreneur and DOGE leader Elon Musk said on Monday that X suffered an outage due to a "large-scale cyberattack" originating from the "Ukraine region." "We're not sure exactly what happened," Musk told Fox Business Network host Larry Kudlow regarding the apparent attack on his social media platform.
"But there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area," the world's richest man added. Musk, 53, did not immediately provide further proof regarding who might be behind the attack. Hackers are known to use fake IP addresses to impersonate computer systems from various regions, a practice known as "spoofing."
Musk Still Isn't Sure About Attacker
Experts told The New York Post that it was highly unlikely Ukrainian government officials were behind such a bold and widespread cyberattack, especially just a day before diplomats from Washington and Kyiv were set to meet in Saudi Arabia.
"It makes absolutely no sense for Ukrainian hackers to attack Elon Musk the day before a meeting between the United States and Ukraine in which they are attempting to get the United States to start sharing intelligence again, and provide aid and assistance, working towards a peace agreement that has been in question since the Oval Office visit," the Atlantic Council's Alex Plitsas told The Post on Monday.
"The question everyone looking at this needs to ask themselves is, 'who benefits from this?' And it's not Ukraine."
Although other groups, like the cyber-hacker group Anonymous—known for its criticism of Musk—might have reasons to target X, only Russia would have a motive to connect or blame Ukraine for the attack.
"Anonymous is another likely possibility based on the statements they put out publicly and the capability and desire to hit (Musk), but in terms of who stands to benefit based on the timing — the only one is really the Russians, because doing it today would disrupt the talks that are scheduled for tomorrow," Plitsas said.
"The only people that would stand to benefit from that would be the Russians in the sense that they're blaming the Ukrainians, so they would want the Ukrainians to look bad and disrupt the talks."
Attacker Wanted to Damage Relationships
Moreover, Russian cyber operatives likely had more opportunity to launch such an attack after the U.S. suspended offensive cyber operations against Moscow last week. On Monday, thousands of social media users reported disruptions on X throughout the day.
According to DownDetector.com, reports of issues began surfacing at 6 a.m., with over 40,000 users experiencing problems by 10 a.m.
By Monday afternoon, an additional 25,000 users had reported difficulties with the X app, as noted by the crash-monitoring website.
"It's up," Musk said when Kudlow asked about the platform's status shortly before 5 p.m. ET.
Earlier in the day, the X CEO attributed the widespread outage to a "massive cyberattack" but did not specify its exact origin.
"We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources," he wrote on X. "Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved."
Just a day earlier, Musk had highlighted how his technology has been supporting the Ukrainian military.
Shortly after Russia's invasion in February 2022, the tech billionaire provided the Kyiv government with access to Starlink terminals. These terminals have remained crucial to Ukraine's military operations.
