X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced significant outages on March 10, 2025, due to a cyberattack. Elon Musk claimed that the IP addresses involved in the attack were linked to Ukraine, though he provided no hard evidence to support this claim.
More than 40,000 reports of an outage at X were received on Monday morning by DownDetector.
“We’re not sure exactly what happened,” Musk told US media. “But there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area… We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources.”
A group named Dark Storm Team had claimed responsibility for the distributed denial of service (DDoS). It has since deleted its statement of responsibility that it posted on Telegram.
However, cybersecurity experts have already moved to debunk Musk’s claims of Ukrainian involvement. Security researcher Kevin Beaumont said on Bluesky that Musk’s claim is “missing a key fact — it was actually IPs from worldwide, not just Ukraine.”
Specifically, he said it was a Mirai variant botnet, which is made of compromised cameras. Beaumont said while he is not sure who is behind the attack, it “smells of APTs — advanced persistent teenagers.”
