Social media platform X experienced intermittent outages on Monday, with owner Elon Musk attributing the disruption to an unusually powerful cyberattack. Musk claimed the attack involved significant resources, suggesting it was orchestrated by a large, coordinated group or even a country. However, cybersecurity experts expressed skepticism, noting that similar denial-of-service attacks are often carried out by small groups or individuals.
According to Downdetector, the outage peaked at 10 am ET, affecting 39,021 users in the US. By 5 pm, around 1,500 users still reported issues. An anonymous source in the internet infrastructure industry revealed that X was hit by multiple waves of denial-of-service attacks starting around 9:45 UTC. Such attacks overwhelm websites with rogue traffic, causing significant disruption despite their lack of sophistication.
Musk later stated in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Larry Kudlow that the attack originated from IP addresses in the Ukraine region. However, the industry source disputed this, noting that much of the rogue traffic came from IP addresses in the US, Vietnam, Brazil, and other countries, with minimal traffic directly linked to Ukraine.
Denial-of-service attacks are notoriously difficult to trace, and IP addresses rarely reveal the true perpetrators. Musk, who has been critical of Ukraine’s efforts in its conflict with Russia, recently claimed that Ukraine’s front line would collapse without his Starlink satellite service, though he assured that access would not be cut off. The outage highlights ongoing vulnerabilities in digital infrastructure and the challenges of attributing cyberattacks.
