Elon Musk blames Ukraine for mass cyberattack on X

Elon Musk’s social media platform X has been targeted in a mass cyberattack that he says originated in Ukraine.

Musk took to X to share that the hack involved so many resources that he believes it could only be the work of a “coordinated group” or a foreign country.

During an interview on Fox Business, Musk said that while his team were “not sure exactly what happened” he confirmed there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system “with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area”.

In a post on X, the tech billionaire 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 …”

It is possible to mask IP addresses and make it seem as though a hack is originating elsewhere.

Even though he helped Ukraine’s early war effort by rolling out the Starlink internet service in the country, Mr Musk has more recently become a vocal critic of Ukraine.

In the aftermath of the disastrous meeting at the White House with US President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, the DOGE boss branded Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenksy as “evil”.

“Zelensky wants a forever war, a never-ending graft meat grinder. This is evil,” Mr Musk said at the time.

He has also previously warned Russia and Ukraine must strike a peace deal.

“We are sleepwalking our way into World War III with one foolish decision after the other.”

Complaints about outages on X spiked on Monday at 6am local time and again at 10am (during the early hours of Tuesday AEDT), with more than 40,000 users reporting no access to the platform, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com.

By afternoon, the reports had dropped to the low thousands.

A sustained outage that lasted at least an hour began at noon, with the heaviest disruptions occurring along the US coasts.

Downdetector.com said that 56 per cent of problems were reported for the X app, while 33 per cent were reported for the website.

It’s not possible to definitively verify Musk’s claims without seeing technical data from X, and the likelihood of them releasing that is “pretty low”, said Nicholas Reese, an adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs in New York University’s School of Professional Studies and expert in cyber operations.

Reese said the likelihood that a state actor was behind the outages “doesn’t make a lot of sense” given their short duration, unless it was a warning for something larger to come.

“There are kind of two types of cyberattacks, there are ones that are designed to be very loud and there are ones that are designed to be very quiet,” he said.

“And the ones that are usually the most valuable are the ones that are very quiet. Something like this was designed to be discovered. So to me that almost certainly eliminates state actors. And the value that they would have gained from it is pretty low.”

Reese added that it’s possible that a group was trying to make a statement with causing X outages, but added that such a temporary outage “is not much of a statement to me”.

“It’s only really a statement if there is some kind of follow on action, which I would not rule out at this point,” he said.

— with AAP.