Elon Musk is now claiming that bad actors in Ukraine are behind an alleged cyberattack that caused outages on his social media platform X on Monday.
In an interview, Musk told Fox Business that he believes the attack came from “IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”
Musk admitted that “we don’t know exactly what happened”—nodding as his comments were characterized as a suspicion and discussing no evidence—but alleged that the attackers were trying to take down the entire X platform.
After DownDetector reported that tens of thousands of users globally experienced repeated X (formerly Twitter) outages, Musk confirmed Monday that the issues are due to an ongoing cyberattack on the platform.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk wrote on X. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
Musk has become a vocal critic of the Ukrainian government, but he has not alleged that the government or state actors were behind the X outages.
Details remain vague beyond Musk’s post, but rumors were circulating that X was under a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. In 2025, the number of DDOS attacks have spiked, partly propelled by a massive botnet largely concentrated in the US delivering record-sized attacks.
X’s official support channel, which has been dormant since August, has so far remained silent on the outage, but one user asked Grok—X’s chatbot that provides AI summaries of news—what was going on, and the chatbot echoed suspicions about the DDOS attack while raising other theories.
“Over 40,000 users reported issues, with the platform struggling to load globally,” Grok said. “No clear motive yet, but some speculate it’s political since X is the only target. Outages hit hard in the US, Switzerland, and beyond.”
As X goes down, users cry for Twitter
It has been almost two years since Elon Musk declared that Twitter “no longer exists,” haphazardly rushing to rebrand his social media company as X despite critics warning that users wouldn’t easily abandon the Twitter brand.
Fast-forward to today, and Musk got a reminder that his efforts to kill off the Twitter brand never really caught on with a large chunk of his platform.
While #MyX began trending on the platform alongside “My Twitter,” the latter had much higher engagement, suggesting that many users still default to thinking of the service as Twitter. About 360,000 users posted about “my X,” as more than a million panic-posted about “My Twitter.”
“Has anyone noticed that people are saying ‘My Twitter’ instead of ‘My X’?” one X user, @VulFuru47, wrote, joking, “Did we just go through a great reset?”
Musk began his Twitter rebrand in April 2023, confirming in a court filing that Twitter had merged with X Corp. and would no longer be known by its former name. But efforts to rebrand the social platform were not smooth, with the Twitter name remaining confusingly intermixed with X branding throughout the platform. It took more than a year, for example, to even redirect twitter.com URLs to x.com.
In the years since, analysts called the rebrand a mistake, seemingly instantly harming brand loyalty. And users have debated in Reddit threads and blogs whether they’ll ever refer to the platform as X, leading Musk to demand last year that users respect the rebrand. There have also been several reported exoduses of users since Musk’s takeover, most recently after the US presidential election results in November pushed users in “droves” to ad-free X rival Bluesky, Forbes reported.
For thousands of users who stuck with X or joined the platform through the rebrand, X failed to load Monday. In the past, X’s Support channel has posted messaging explaining platform-wide issues, so it’s possible more information will be posted there once the issues are resolved.
This story was updated on Tuesday, March 11, to include Musk’s comments to Fox Business.