Did Ukraine really take down X or is Musk covering something up?

The social media platform X experienced significant outages on March 10, 2025, which CEO Elon Musk attributed to a “massive cyberattack” linked to IP addresses from Ukraine. Musk stated, “We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the ecosystem with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area,” during an interview with Fox Business.

According to Downdetector, over 10,883 reports of service failures were logged by 9:25 AM on the day of the incident, affecting users in major cities including London, Birmingham, New York, and Los Angeles. Frustrated users turned to alternative platforms like Facebook and Threads to express their inability to access X, sharing messages such as “Can’t access” and “So it begins.”

Musk claimed that the cyberattack was executed with significant resources, indicating possible involvement of a “large, coordinated group and/or a country.” However, cybersecurity experts expressed skepticism regarding Musk’s assertions. They noted that denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which could cause such outages, may also be executed by small groups or even individual hackers. An anonymous industry source informed Reuters that much of the traffic targeting X seemed to originate from various countries, including the U.S., Vietnam, and Brazil, with traffic from Ukraine deemed “insignificant.”

This incident is not Musk’s first attribution of technical issues to cyberattacks. On the same day as the outages, he publicly criticized U.S. Senator Mark Kelly, calling him a “traitor” for sharing details of his visit to Ukraine. In his role leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk has advocated for significant reductions in U.S. humanitarian aid to Ukraine, labeling U.S.-funded media outlets in the country as wasteful and responsible for “torching” up to a billion dollars in taxpayer funds.

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Additionally, the hacker group known as the ‘Dark Storm Team’ claimed responsibility for the X outage in a post on Telegram. This group has previously targeted businesses in Israel and NATO countries and recently threatened to conduct cyberattacks on government websites of NATO nations, Israel, and their allies.

As the outage continued, users logged into the platform encountered error messages indicating problems, such as “Something went wrong, try reloading.” Musk, who acquired Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and rebranded it as X, has implemented various changes, including a “premium” subscription model that offers extended features for users.

This was not the first large-scale outage reported by Downdetector this month; earlier, over 5,038 Barclays customers had issues with mobile and online banking services, although Barclays attributed its problems to internal issues, not a cyberattack.

Featured image credit: Kelly Sikkema