Experts Dispute Elon Musk’s Claim That Ukraine Caused X Outage

Experts have cast doubt on Elon Musk’s claim that a large-scale outage of X (formerly Twitter) was caused by a cyber-attack originating from Ukraine. The platform experienced widespread disruptions, with over 1.6 million reports of issues. Musk suggested in an interview that a massive attack targeted X’s infrastructure, but cyber security specialists, including Prof. Ciaran Martin of Oxford University, dismissed the explanation as ‘garbage.’ Analysts believe the outage was likely due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, a common but preventable cyber-attack. Prof. Martin noted that large companies rarely suffer from such disruptions, indicating possible weaknesses in X’s cybersecurity measures. NetBlocks confirmed that the outage resembled past DDoS incidents, lasting for hours and impacting users globally. While Musk implied that a nation-state or a coordinated group was behind the attack, no evidence supports this claim, and cybersecurity experts argue that tracing IP addresses does not conclusively determine the source. X has been targeted by similar attacks before, such as one by the hacker group Anonymous Sudan in 2023. Cybersecurity professionals warn that DDoS attacks are on the rise, posing risks to various industries. The BBC has reached out to the Ukrainian embassy for a response.