Social media platform X experienced intermittent outages on Monday, with owner Elon Musk attributing the disruption to a cyberattack so advanced that it required the resources of a Bond villain—or an entire country.
“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk proclaimed in a post on X, seemingly implying that either an elite hacker syndicate or a shadowy government operation had nothing better to do than bring down his struggling social network.
Cybersecurity experts, however, were less convinced. Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, which flood platforms with rogue traffic, have historically been carried out by everyone from basement-dwelling teens to small activist groups with a grudge. “A ‘lot of resources’ in this case could mean a guy with a laptop, some cheap bots, and too much free time,” one expert noted.
At the peak of the outage, Downdetector reported that 39,021 U.S. users could not access X—approximately the same number as a Taylor Swift fan club, but significantly fewer than Musk’s daily retweets of himself. By 5 p.m., that number had dropped to 1,500 users, suggesting that either the attackers got bored or people gave up trying to log in.
Adding a touch of international intrigue, Musk later told Fox Business Network’s Larry Kudlow that the attack originated from IP addresses in Ukraine. A source in the internet infrastructure industry, however, dismissed this claim, pointing out that much of the rogue traffic actually came from the United States, Vietnam, and Brazil. “The amount of traffic from Ukraine was insignificant,” the source said, diplomatically avoiding the phrase “completely made up.”
Denial-of-service attacks are notoriously difficult to trace back to their true perpetrators, but experts agree that IP addresses alone rarely tell the full story. As one cybersecurity analyst put it, “If blaming random IP addresses was that simple, my grandma would be on the hook for every internet outage in the country.”
The X owner’s remarks come amid his ongoing, sometimes soap opera-esque commentary on global affairs. Over the weekend, Musk claimed that Ukraine’s front line “would collapse” without his Starlink satellite service but reassured everyone he wouldn’t actually cut it off—yet. This statement left many wondering whether he was offering military analysis or teasing the next season of a dystopian sci-fi series.
In the meantime, X remains online, the alleged attackers remain mysterious, and Musk remains Musk.
