Elon Musk points X collapse finger at Ukraine – but is there any evidence?

If you were trying to scroll through X (formerly Twitter) on Monday and found nothing loading, you weren’t alone. At its worst, more than 39,000 U.S. users reported problems accessing the platform, according to Downdetector, with issues peaking around 10 a.m. ET and lingering into the evening. But while most users were using their fingers to refresh their feeds in frustration, Elon Musk was pointing his in very specific direction – towards Ukraine.

In a post on X, once it had returned, Musk claimed the platform had suffered a “massive” cyberattack, adding that “a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.” Later, in an interview with Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow, Musk went further, saying the attack was launched from IP addresses “originating in the Ukraine area.”

Was Ukraine behind the X outage?

That’s where things start to fall apart. Cybersecurity experts immediately questioned Musk’s claim, pointing out that while denial-of-service (DoS) attacks – the kind Musk described – can cause disruption, they don’t require a nation-state to pull off. Small groups, or even individuals, with enough compromised devices can flood a site with bogus traffic and bring it down.

“We get attacked every day,” Musk wrote, “but this was done with a lot of resources.” What exactly he meant by “a lot of resources” remains unclear – and that’s part of the problem.

An industry insider familiar with the attack, who spoke anonymously because they weren’t authorized to comment publicly, told reporters that much of the rogue traffic hitting X’s servers appeared to come from IP addresses in the United States, Vietnam, Brazil, and other countries. “Insignificant” traffic was traced to Ukraine, they said.

Oh, and IP addresses can be easily faked with compromised computers (part of so-called botnets) spread across the globe often used in DoS attacks, masking the real perpetrators.

Why would Musk want to blame Ukraine?

If you’ve been following the news over recent months, the answer to this question should likely already be clear to you. Musk’s decision to call out Ukraine comes as his own relationship with the country grows ever more complicated.

Just a day before the X outage, Musk made headlines for claiming that Ukraine’s front line against Russia “would collapse” without Starlink, the satellite internet system he controls, although he insisted he wouldn’t cut the country off from the service.

Musk is also clearly aligned with Donald Trump, who has criticized, and recently removed, U.S. aid to Ukraine. Were his comments on the X attack influenced by politics as much as cybersecurity evidence? Could it all be part of an elaborate plan?

Who did attack X?

At this point, there’s no solid public evidence pointing to Ukraine or any specific group. Denial of service attacks are messy, often global, and hard to trace – and experts caution against leaping to conclusions without proof. Like that’s going to stop some people with millions of followers happy to lap up anything they spout.

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