Elon Musk claims ‘massive cyberattack’ behind widespread X outage, hints at Ukraine connection

Tech billionaire Elon Musk on Monday claimed a massive cyberattack on his social media platform X after it suffered a widespread disruption.

Tens of thousands of users across multiple countries reported issues in accessing the microblogging platform.

According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, X users in India began reporting disruptions at around 2:53pm IST, which peaked around 3:30 pm with over 2,200 reports.

The interruptions surged again around 7:30 pm as 1,500 reports were received on the outage tracking website.

Services remained patchy till Monday evening -- appearing to be partially restored at times before being disrupted again.

The extent of impact was far more severe globally as more than 22,000 users in the United States and over 10,000 users in the United Kingdom had reported issues by 3:30 pm.

According to Downdetector, nearly 53% of problems were related to the website, 41% to the app and 6 per cent to server connections.

While X did not officially confirm the reason behind the outage, its owner, Elon Musk, blamed it on a cyberattack.

Quoting an X user who hinted at the possibility of an attack on X, Elon Musk posted, "There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏."

"We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved," the billionaire wrote, adding that he was "tracing" the origin of the purported attack.

Musk did not clarify exactly what he meant by "a lot of resources".

However, cybersecurity specialists pointed out that attacks of this nature — called denials of service — have repeatedly been executed by small groups or individuals, reported Reuters.

According to the report, X had been hit by several waves of denial of service, which are "notoriously hard to trace back to their authors and the IP addresses involved rarely provide any meaningful insight into who was behind them."

In an interview with Fox Business Network, Musk claimed the cyberattack came from IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.

Musk, who is leading the cost-cutting measures in the Donald Trump administration, has joined the US president in criticising Ukraine’s war efforts against Russian invasion.