Social media platform X went down intermittently on Monday, with proprietor Elon Musk blaming an unusually highly effective cyberattack.
“We get attacked daily, however this was achieved with loads of sources. Both a big, coordinated group and/or a rustic is concerned,” Musk mentioned in a post on X earlier Monday.
He didn’t make clear precisely what he meant by “loads of sources” and his feedback drew skepticism from cybersecurity specialists, who identified that assaults of this nature — referred to as denials of service — have repeatedly been executed by small teams or people.
X confronted intermittent outages, in keeping with Downdetector, limiting 39,021 customers within the US from accessing the platform at its peak at 10 am ET. By 5 pm, there have been reviews of the service being down for roughly 1,500 customers.
A supply within the web infrastructure trade mentioned X had been hit by a number of waves of denial of service starting round 9:45 UTC. The supply spoke on the situation of anonymity because the individual was not authorised to talk publicly on the matter.
Denial of service works by overwhelming focused web sites with rogue visitors. Such assaults aren’t essentially refined however they will trigger vital disruption.
Musk later mentioned in an interview with Fox Enterprise Community’s Larry Kudlow the cyberattack got here from IP addresses originating within the Ukraine space.
The trade supply disputed Musk’s account, saying that giant chunks of the rogue visitors bombarding X might be traced again to IP addresses in america, Vietnam, Brazil and different international locations, and that the quantity of rogue visitors coming straight from Ukraine was “insignificant.”
In any case, denial of service assaults are notoriously laborious to hint again to their authors and the IP addresses concerned hardly ever present any significant perception into who was behind them.
Musk has joined US President Donald Trump, whom he serves as an adviser, in criticising Ukraine’s continued efforts to battle off a Russian invasion. Musk mentioned on Sunday that Ukraine’s entrance line “would collapse” with out his Starlink satellite tv for pc communications service, although he mentioned he wouldn’t reduce off Ukraine’s entry to it.
© Thomson Reuters 2025
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