Elon Musk said his social media platform X was targeted in a “massive cyberattack” on Monday, prompting outages for thousands of users.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk wrote on the platform Monday afternoon. “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. Tracing…”
In a later interview on Fox Business, Musk claimed the IP addresses behind the attack were tied back to “the Ukraine area.”
“We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyber attack to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area,” Musk said.
Musk did not provide any further information, and X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The remark came hours after users first reported issues with the platform early Monday morning.
Issues were first reported around 5:30 a.m. EDT, hitting a high of nearly 21,000 reports shortly before 6 a.m. Outage reports drastically dropped until about 9:30 a.m. EDT, when reports spiked back up, according to the outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.
Outage reports peaked at more than 41,000 users shortly after 10 a.m., according to the website. The issues appeared to be resolved in about 45 minutes, but the outage returned less than 30 minutes later. As of 1 p.m. EDT, more than 35,000 users reported issues.
It comes months after the Musk-owned platform experienced widespread error reports last August. Thousands of users were reportedly impacted and unable to access the app, while some users said the date showed up wrong on their feed.
Musk’s mention of Ukraine in relation to Monday’s attack comes amid increasing tensions with the Eastern European country. President Trump has ramped up criticism of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in recent weeks. He has paused U.S. aid to Ukraine and has suggested Kyiv is more of an obstacle to peace than Russia amid the countries’ more than three-year war.
— Updated at 4:51 p.m. EDT
