Elon Musk’s X was hit by waves of outages earlier Monday, which the billionaire claims was due to a cyberattack with IP addresses originating in Ukraine.
“We’re 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.
Many users on DownDetector said the platform wouldn’t load, and the outage appeared to be global, according to DownDetector’s international sites. During the Fox Business interview, which aired during the 4 p.m. ET hour, Musk said platform was working again.
DownDetector data is self-reported, meaning it doesn’t fully represent the outage’s scale. CNN has reached out to X, though the company doesn’t 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 wasn’t 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.