Musk Claims X Outage Was a ‘Massive Cyberattack,’ Experts Skeptical

On Monday, X experienced widespread outages, affecting thousands of users. Later, Elon Musk suggested that the platform had been hit by a major cyberattack, claiming a well-resourced group or even a nation-state might be responsible.

"We face attacks daily, but this one was particularly large-scale," Musk wrote on X. "Either a highly coordinated group or a country is involved. We're tracing it..."

During an interview with Fox Business Network’s Kudlow, Musk later stated that the attack appeared to originate from "IP addresses in the Ukraine area," though he provided no further details.

Cybersecurity specialists quickly cast doubt on the claim that Ukraine was the source of the attack. Researcher Kevin Beaumont noted on Bluesky that the attack was global, not just from Ukraine, and was likely carried out using a Mirai botnet – a network of compromised devices, such as security cameras. He jokingly referred to the attackers as "advanced persistent teenagers" (APTs), suggesting it could be the work of opportunistic hackers rather than a nation-state.

Allan Liska from cybersecurity firm Recorded Future reinforced this skepticism, explaining that even if all IP addresses appeared to come from Ukraine (which he found unlikely), they were probably part of a botnet controlled by a third party operating from anywhere in the world.

Reports of service disruptions on X began Monday at 6 a.m. ET and spiked again around 10 a.m., with more than 40,000 users reporting access issues, according to Downdetector.com. By the afternoon, the number of reports had dropped to the low thousands.

A more severe outage started around noon, lasting over an hour, with the worst disruptions seen along the U.S. coasts. Downdetector reported that 56% of complaints came from X’s app users, while 33% were related to the website.

Nicholas Reese, a cyber operations expert and adjunct instructor at New York University, said there’s no way to confirm Musk’s claims without technical evidence from X, which he doubts the company will release.

Reese also questioned the idea that a nation-state was behind the attack, pointing out that the outage was relatively short-lived. "State-sponsored cyberattacks tend to be stealthy and valuable rather than loud and disruptive," he explained. "This incident seems too obvious to be the work of a government."

While Reese acknowledged that a hacker group might have intended to send a message by disrupting X, he added that such a temporary outage isn’t a strong statement. "It only really matters if there's a follow-up attack, which we can’t rule out just yet," he said.

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