Elon Musk has alleged that a “massive cyberattack” on X (formerly Twitter) originated from the “Ukraine area” after the platform suffered repeated outages on Monday. However, a pro-Palestinian hacker group, Dark Storm Team, has claimed responsibility, sparking uncertainty over the actual source of the attack.
During an interview with Larry Kudlow on Fox News, Musk stated, “We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” Despite the disruption, Musk reassured that the platform was operational, stating, “It’s up.”
Dark Storm Team, which has been attacking entities that support Israel’s Gaza war effort, claimed responsibility for a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack via its Telegram channel. The group had previously launched cyberattacks against governments and businesses that supported Israel during the Gaza conflict, which intensified after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel.
In an earlier X post, Musk attributed the outage to a well-coordinated cyberattack.
“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,” he wrote.
However, he did not specify what he meant by “a lot of resources,” raising skepticism among cybersecurity experts. They pointed out that DDoS attacks can be executed by small groups or even individuals using botnets to flood systems with rogue traffic.
X had widespread disruption of services, with Downdetector indicating a high of 39,021 impacted users in the United States by 10 a.m. ET. Reports of disruption by 5 p.m. were down to around 1,500. In an interview with Reuters, anonymously, an insider in the internet infrastructure space described X being targeted by waves of DDoS attacks from 9:45 UTC. Such attacks are inconvenient, but they are not necessarily technically complex.
The cyberattack occurred as Musk continued to voice his opinions on Ukraine’s war efforts against Russia. The billionaire has been vocal about the role of his Starlink satellite service in Ukraine’s defense, recently asserting that the country’s “front line would collapse” without it. Earlier while advocating for Ukraine’s connectivity via Starlink, Musk has condemned the ongoing war as a “stalemate that Ukraine will inevitably lose.”
Strikingly, the resourceful billionaire has already dropped hint regarding this stating that Ukraine’s Military will “collapse” without Starlink Internet. Now, that the Trump administration has left Ukraine high and dry, the continuation of Starlink services to Ukrainian side were always the Elephant in the room. This is particularly noteworthy when the Trump admin had earlier stressed the need for an election in Ukraine, hinting their distrust in Zelenksyy’s regime and a possible undoing of the Ukrainian Maidan protest.
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Nonetheless, Musk also denied allegations of pro-Russian bias, saying he had already called out Russian President Vladimir Putin to “one-on-one combat over Ukraine.”
