X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, suffered multiple widespread outages on Monday, with owner Elon Musk attributing the technical problems to a “massive cyberattack” potentially linked to Ukraine.
Users began reporting issues accessing the platform around 5:30 a.m. ET on March 10. After a brief recovery, two additional significant service disruptions occurred at approximately 9:30 a.m. and 11 a.m. ET, according to website monitoring service Downdetector.
Many users attempting to access X encountered error messages from Cloudflare, a content delivery network and cybersecurity provider, stating “Web server is returning an unknown error.”
Musk addressed the situation in a post on X at 1:25 p.m. ET, writing: “There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 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. Tracing…”
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Later, in an interview with Fox Business Network anchor Larry Kudlow, Musk went on to explain further that the company was “not sure exactly what happened” but asserted the attack came from “the Ukraine area.” The interview took place at Washington D.C.’s Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
The timing is significant for the technology problems during scrutiny of Musk as a polarizing figure both politically and in tech. Musk is currently heading President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where the chief executive oversaw massive federal staffing reductions and program shutdowns throughout recent weeks.
His companies, particularly Tesla, have been protested and criticized in relation to his role in the Trump administration and the severe government spending cuts imposed by DOGE. This political alignment is a stark departure for the tech billionaire, who bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion and subsequently laid off around 80% of its staff.
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In July 2023, Musk renamed Twitter to X, which he defined as part of his vision to build “the everything app.” The letter X is important to Musk on a personal level, as he has used it in several of his companies throughout his career. Monday’s disruptions illustrate the persistent issues plaguing the platform since Musk took over as CEO.
Although cyber attacks on large tech platforms are not unheard of, Monday’s scale and Musk’s public finger-pointing at potentially state-sponsored actors are a dramatic escalation of security issues for the social media platform. The incident also serves to highlight the increasingly advanced interplay between politics, technology, and world events in the modern digital era.
As X struggles with these technical problems, questions are raised about the resilience of the platform’s infrastructure and security protocols in the wake of the sweeping reorganization under Musk’s leadership.
Neither X nor Musk have provided technical information about the nature of the purported attack or evidence of Ukrainian provenance.
Cybersecurity professionals usually need extensive forensic analysis before attributing attacks to a particular region or entity, making early attribution claims hard to independently confirm. As of Monday evening, service to X seemed to be mostly restored, but the company had yet to make a full announcement on the outages or possible security breaches.
