Elon Musk Blames Cyberattack on X on Ukraine, Experts Dispute State Involvement

By Staff, Agencies

Following a global outage on X, Elon Musk claimed on Monday that the platform had been hit by a "massive cyberattack" originating from the "Ukraine area."

Thousands of users reported service disruptions throughout the day, prompting Musk to post on X that the attack was executed with significant resources. "We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources," Musk wrote. "Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved."

A source from the internet infrastructure sector told Reuters that X had been targeted by multiple waves of denial-of-service [DoS] attacks around 9:45 a.m. US time on Monday.

During an interview with Fox, Musk reiterated that the attack had originated from IP addresses in "the Ukraine area" and was aimed at "bringing down the X system." However, he did not provide any concrete evidence to support this claim.

The timing of the attack raised doubts among cybersecurity experts, as it occurred just a day before US and Ukrainian officials were scheduled to meet in Saudi Arabia for peace talks.

Alex Plitsas from the Atlantic Council questioned the plausibility of Ukraine's involvement, stating, "It makes absolutely no sense for Ukrainian hackers to attack Elon Musk the day before a meeting between the United States and Ukraine in which they are attempting to get the United States to start sharing intelligence again, and provide aid and assistance, working towards a peace agreement that has been in question since the Oval Office visit."

Nicholas Reese, an adjunct instructor at New York University's Center for Global Affairs, also doubted that a state actor was behind the attack, pointing to the short duration of the outage.

He explained that state-backed cyberattacks are usually stealthy, while this one was designed to be noticed. "And the ones that are usually the most valuable are the ones that are very quiet. Something like this was designed to be discovered. So to me, that almost certainly eliminates state actors," Reese told the Star Tribune.

While he acknowledged that a non-state group may have been trying to make a statement with the attack, Reese remarked that such a brief disruption was "not much of a statement to me."