NEW YORK (CNN) – Elon Musk’s X hit a wave of outages early Monday. This is a result of a cyberattack on IP addresses derived from Ukraine.
“I don’t know exactly what happened,” Musk said in an interview with Fox Business on Monday afternoon. “However, there was a massive cyberattack to try to defeat X systems, which have IP addresses in the Ukraine region.”
Musk did not give further details on the origins of the attack, including whether he believes it is linked to the Ukrainian government. You can mask your IP address to make it look like your traffic is coming from another location.
The issue began around 6am when up to 20,538 users reported the issue, according to down detectors at the outage tracking site. The problem was temporarily vanishing before about 40,000 users reported an outage at 10am. The outages reported on the down detector began to drop around 2pm and left the entire afternoon.
According to Downdetector’s international site, many users of Downtector’s platform did not load and the outage appeared to be global. Musk said in a Fox business interview that aired at 4pm at 4pm the platform was working again.
Down detector data is self-reported. In other words, it does not fully represent the scale of the stop. CNN contacts X, but the company usually does not respond to press.
Musk posted to X early Monday afternoon that he believed that it had “a large, coordinated group and/or country involved,” but the source of the motivation behind the attack was not confirmed. Musk also replied “Yes” to X’s post. It suggests that people are trying to silence the billionaire and his platform, but details about the service disruption, such as whether it was caused by targeted attacks, have not been revealed.
Eric Noonan, CEO of cybersecurity provider Cyberseats, told CNN it was likely too early to determine if the attack caused problems.
“One thing to take with a single grain of salt at all times is a statement made in a short period of time, either immediately after the attack or even in this case,” Noonan said.
Mask has a history of attributing technical snuffs to cyberattacks. When the conversation with Donald Trump on X began 42 minutes late in August 2024, he said there was a “probability” for an attack.
“Given the salience of this conversation, of course there was a 100% chance of a DDOS attack,” Musk posted on social media platforms at the time. DDO stands for “distributed denial” and includes overwhelming servers with fake traffic to cause service disruption. However, the announcement of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ 2023 presidential campaign at X was also undermined by technical difficulties.
According to Noonan, ransomware attacks have been more common in recent years than DDOS attacks. However, DDO is usually used to cause confusion, making it more difficult to cause these types of attacks.
Musk has implemented extensive cuts and major changes to X after acquiring the popular social media platform in 2022, then a popular social media platform called Twitter. He fired 80% of his staff in total, demanding that the remaining employees return to the office full time.
The platform has experienced a series of glitches and confusion since its acquisition.
It was a tough day for the company owned by masks. He is also the director of Trump’s Government Efficiency (DOGE). On Monday, Tesla shares fell 15% on Monday, erasing profits since Trump’s November 2024 election.
This story has been developed and updated.
CNN’s Clare Duffy and Hadas Gold contributed to this report.
CNN Wire
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