Elon Musk claims ‘Ukraine area’ was at fault for ‘massive cyberattack’ that saw X go down
Elon Musk has claimed it’s somewhere in the ‘Ukraine area’ that caused X to go down yesterday.
Thousands of users reported problems with the platform on 10 March as the tech boss said it has been hit by a ‘massive cyberattack’.
“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk posted. “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
And ever ‘tracing’ where this attack came from, he’s now accused part of the war-torn country amid recent heated discussions with the US.
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Although, he still admitted in the interview with Fox Business Network on Monday afternoon: “Well, we’re not sure exactly what happened.”
He then went on to say: “But there was a massive cyber-attack to try and bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”
With relations between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy having soured somewhat lately, Musk has been pretty outspoken in criticising the Ukrainian government.
Over the weekend, the Tesla CEO claimed the eastern European country’s ‘entire front line’ would collapse if he turned off his Starlink satellite communications.
And also yesterday, he called US Senator Mark Kelly a ‘traitor’ for going to Ukraine over the weekend - the Democrat said the visit ‘proved to me we can’t give up on the Ukrainian people’.
“Elon, if you don't understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do,” Senator Kelly replied on X.
Beside his accusation of the problem coming from the ‘Ukraine area’, an expert has backed up that yesterday’s outages on the platform could indeed be down to a cyberattack.
Alp Toker, director of Netblocks which monitors the connectivity of web services, told the BBC: “What we've been seeing is consistent with what we've seen in past denial of service attacks, rather than a configuration or coding error in the platform.”
He added that Netblocks had seen a number of major outages for over six hours yesterday with ‘each having global impact’.
"This is amongst the longest X/Twitter outages we've tracked in terms of duration, and the pattern is consistent with a denial of service attack targeting X's infrastructure at scale," he added.
When a user responded to Musk’s post about there being cyberattacks yesterday, they wrote: “They want to silence you and this platform.”
To which the billionaire boss replied: “Yes.”
Topics: Elon Musk, Ukraine, Donald Trump, Twitter, Technology
Jess Battison