For much of Monday, X was largely inaccessible, frustrating users who rely on the platform. Reports of outages began surfacing early in the morning, with Down Detector showing a significant spike between 5:30 AM and 6:30 AM ET, followed by additional disruptions later in the day. Engadget staff also experienced difficulties accessing tweets, with only brief moments of functionality.
Elon Musk, the platform’s owner, took to X to explain the issue, claiming that a “massive cyberattack” was responsible. He suggested that the attack was carried out by either a well-organized group or a nation-state but did not provide concrete evidence. Cybersecurity experts told NBC News that Musk’s claims were plausible, given the pattern of service disruptions.
“It’s difficult to be certain, but given the three observed outages, a denial-of-service attack targeting X’s infrastructure can’t be ruled out,” said Isik Mater, director of research at NetBlocks, an organization that monitors global internet activity. “This is one of the longest X/Twitter outages we’ve recorded.”
Later in the day, Musk elaborated on the situation during an interview with Larry Kudlow on Fox Business, stating that the cyberattack had “IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” According to Cloudflare, a network services company, Ukraine has increasingly become a source of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Their latest report ranked Ukraine as the fourth-largest source of such attacks, following Singapore, Hong Kong, and Indonesia.
