Musk had initially claimed a ‘large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved’
Elon Musk has claimed it’s somewhere in the ‘Ukraine area’ that caused X to go down yesterday.
Thousands of users reported problems with the platform on 10 March as the tech boss said it has been hit by a ‘massive cyberattack’.
“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk posted. “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
And ever ‘tracing’ where this attack came from, he’s now accused part of the war-torn country amid recent heated discussions with the US.
Although, he still admitted in the interview with Fox Business Network on Monday afternoon: “Well, we’re not sure exactly what happened.”
He then went on to say: “But there was a massive cyber-attack to try and bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”
With relations between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy having soured somewhat lately, Musk has been pretty outspoken in criticising the Ukrainian government.
Over the weekend, the Tesla CEO claimed the eastern European country’s ‘entire front line’ would collapse if he turned off his Starlink satellite communications.
Elon Musk claims the cyberattack came from the ‘Ukraine area’ (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
And also yesterday, he called US Senator Mark Kelly a ‘traitor’ for going to Ukraine over the weekend – the Democrat said the visit ‘proved to me we can’t give up on the Ukrainian people’.
“Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do,” Senator Kelly replied on X.
Beside his accusation of the problem coming from the ‘Ukraine area’, an expert has backed up that yesterday’s outages on the platform could indeed be down to a cyberattack.
Alp Toker, director of Netblocks which monitors the connectivity of web services, told the BBC: “What we’ve been seeing is consistent with what we’ve seen in past denial of service attacks, rather than a configuration or coding error in the platform.”
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Musk has been critical of Ukraine. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
He added that Netblocks had seen a number of major outages for over six hours yesterday with ‘each having global impact’.
“This is amongst the longest X/Twitter outages we’ve tracked in terms of duration, and the pattern is consistent with a denial of service attack targeting X’s infrastructure at scale,” he added.
When a user responded to Musk’s post about there being cyberattacks yesterday, they wrote: “They want to silence you and this platform.”
To which the billionaire boss replied: “Yes.”
Featured Image Credit: Fox News
Topics: Elon Musk, Ukraine, Donald Trump, Twitter, Technology
Jess Battison
Elon Musk says X has been hit by ‘massive cyber attack’ preventing users from logging in
If you’ve been having problems this might be why
Elon Musk has claimed that his social media site X has been hit by a ‘massive cyber attack’ as a number of users have struggled to log into the platform.
The platform has been suffering from outages today (10 March) and Musk posted online about why he thinks this is.
He wrote: “There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X.
“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 …”
Thousands of users were reporting problems with the platform on the website Downdetector.com, with as many as 40,000 people reporting issues with X, formerly Twitter, by around 10am Eastern time.
There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏. 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 …
First, protests against DOGE. Then, Tesla stores were attacked. Now, 𝕏 is down. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that this downtime is the result of an attack on 𝕏.
When he claimed that X had been hit with a ‘cyber attack’, Musk was responding to a post which was complaining about ‘protests against DOGE’ (Musk’s controversial new role in the US government) and that ‘Tesla stores were attacked’.
This account was then theorising that Twitter being down for people was ‘the result of an attack’ from without rather than technical issues from within the site, leading Musk to quote their message and claim a ‘massive cyber attack’ had been launched and that it must be a large group or even a country.
Someone else replied to Musk saying ‘they want to silence you and this platform’, to which the billionaire replied ‘yes’.
Outages of this kind have happened before, in March 2023 the social media site suffered from a series of glitches which meant that links stopped working and some people couldn’t log into their accounts.
According to Downdetector.com, 63 percent of problems this time around were reported for the X app, while 33 percent were from people trying to access it through a web browser.
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Musk claimed it must be the work of ‘either a large, coordinated group and/or a country’ (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
The issue seems to have been a global one as users from various countries were reporting problems with accessing the social media platform.
SpyoSecure, a cybersecurity team that ‘tracks, exposes, and reports’ scammers, previously said X was the victim of a cyber attack.
It’s a dollop of technological trouble that Musk does not need, hot on the heels of the recent disaster of his failed SpaceX rocket launch.
The rocket blasted off from Texas but very visibly broke up over Florida during a test flight, disrupting over 240 flights as it ended up suffering a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’.
It was meant to land in the Indian Ocean, but with the failed test flight it’s a case of waiting for the next test to see if things get better.
Featured Image Credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
Topics: Elon Musk, Technology, Twitter, Social Media
