Perhaps like the loser of the proposed cage fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg that’s never, ever happening, X has been down and out for much of Monday. Down Detector saw a spike in outage reports from users between around 5:30 AM and 6:30AM ET. There were two more prolonged spikes, denoting more significant outages, later in the morning. Team Engadget has not been able to view tweets on X for the most part, save for a few brief moments when the service showed signed of life.
The platform’s owner, Elon Musk, claimed that 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 that his assertions were plausible.
“It’s difficult to be certain, but given the pattern of three observed outages, a denial service attack targeting X’s infrastructure can’t be ruled out,” Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, which tracks internet connectivity around the world, told the outlet. “It’s certainly one of the longest X/Twitter outages in our records.”
Musk later expanded on the explanation as part of an interview with Larry Kudlow on Fox Business. He told Kudlow that the massive cyberattack had “IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” According to network services company Cloudflare, Ukraine is increasingly the source location for DDoS attacks. The company’s recent DDoS threat report for Q4 2024 had Ukraine as the forth-largest source of DDoSes, behind only Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia.
This isn’t the first time that Musk has blamed a major attack for X’s technical issues. He did the same thing last year when when he held a livestreamed audio chat with President Donald Trump last year and the broadcast wasn’t working.
Update, March 10, 5:13PM ET: This story was updated after publish to include Elon Musk’s comments about the attack having IP addresses originating in “the Ukraine are,” along with some historical detail on DDoS prevelance in the country.
