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Elon Musks X was hit by waves of outages earlier Monday, which the billionaire claims was due to a cyberattack with IP addresses originating in Ukraine.
Were not sure exactly what happened, Musk said during a Fox Business interview Monday afternoon. But there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.
Musk did not give any further details about the origin of the attack, including whether he believes it was connected to the Ukrainian government. It is possible to mask IP addresses and make it seem as though the traffic is coming from elsewhere, and spoofing locations is often offered by hackers-for-hire.
According to outage tracking site DownDetector, the problems began around 6 a.m. ET when up to 20,538 users reported problems. The issues temporarily died down before nearly 40,000 users reported outages at 10 am. Outages reported on DownDetector began to drop around 2 p.m. ET and trailed off throughout the afternoon.
DownDetector data is self-reported, meaning it doesnt fully represent the outages scale. CNN has reached out to X, though the company doesnt usually respond to press inquiries.
Musk posted on X early Monday afternoon that he believed a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved, though the source of motivation behind the attack wasnt confirmed. Musk also replied Yes to a post on X suggesting people are trying to silence the billionaire and his platform, although no further details about the service disruption, including whether it was caused by a targeted attack, have been revealed.
Eric Noonan, CEO of cybersecurity provider CyberSheath, told CNN that its likely too early to tell if an attack caused the issues.
Musk has a history of attributing technical snafus to cyberattacks. When his conversation with Donald Trump on X started 42 minutes late in August 2024, he said there was a probability of an attack.
Given the prominence of this conversation, there was of course a 100% probability of DDOS attacks, Musk posted on the social media platform at the time. DDOS stands for distributed denial-of-service, which involves overwhelming servers with fake traffic to cause service disruptions. But Florida Governor Ron Desantis presidential campaign announcement on X in 2023 was also marred by technical difficulties.
Musk implemented widespread cuts and major changes to X after acquiring the popular social media platform, then called Twitter, in 2022. He immediately laid off top executives and, within days of acquiring X, cut 3,500 people, or around half the platforms workforce. He laid off 80% of the staff in total and required the remaining employees to return-to-office full time.
The platform has experienced a series of glitches and disruptions since the acquisition.
Its been a tough day for the businesses owned by Musk, who is also the head of Trumps Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). On Monday, Tesla shares fell 15% on Monday, erasing its gains since Trumps November 2024 election.
This story is developing and will be updated.
CNNs Clare Duffy, Hadas Gold and Sean Lyngaas contributed to this report.
