Elon Musk’s X experienced a series of outages on Monday, which he attributed to a cyberattack originating from IP addresses in Ukraine.
“We’re not sure exactly what happened,” Musk said during a Fox Business interview on Monday afternoon.
“But there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”
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Musk has a history of attributing technical snafus to cyberattacks.
When his conversation with Donald Trump on X started 42 minutes late in August 2024, he said there was a “probability” of an attack.
“Considering the widespread attention, it was inevitable that there would be DDOS attacks,” Musk stated on social media during the incident.
DDOS stands for “distributed denial-of-service,” which involves overwhelming servers with fake traffic to cause service disruptions.
But Florida Governor Ron Desantis’ presidential campaign announcement on X in 2023 was also marred by technical difficulties.
Ransomware attacks have been more common than DDOS attacks in recent years because they’re usually financially motivated, according to Noonan.
DDOS, however, is typically used to cause a disruption, which also makes confirming the source of these types of attacks more difficult.
Musk implemented widespread cuts and major changes to X after acquiring the popular social media platform, then called Twitter, in 2022.
He immediately laid off top executives and, within days of acquiring X, cut 3500 people, or around half the platform’s workforce.
He laid off 80 per cent of the staff in total and required the remaining employees to return-to-office full time.
The platform has experienced a series of glitches and disruptions since the acquisition.
It’s been a tough day for the businesses owned by Musk, who is also the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
On Monday, Tesla shares fell 15 per cent, erasing its gains since Trump’s November 2024 election.
