March 10 saw Friday start with a scheduled downtime at X, leaving numerous users without access to the service for several hours. Early in the morning, complaints about the network going offline poured in from across both the US and the UK.
Later that day, users regained access to X, wondering what had taken the network down. Elon Musk quickly weighed in, attempting to answer the question that had started trending across the platform.
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Regarding issue X, Musk blamed the disruption on a cyberattack, suggesting that it might still be ongoing. According to him, this attack appeared to have been carried out either by a substantial organization executing a sophisticated operation or possibly even by another nation entirely; however, he did not specify which one.
Following this, specialists have thoroughly analyzed the supposed X cyberattack and offered additional background regarding Musk’s account. According to their conjectures, multiple aspects of Musk’s narrative appear questionable.
What led to the X outage? Specialists have differing opinions according to Musk.
After the X service disruption, Elon Musk joined Fox News where he spoke with host Larry Kudlow, stating that the supposed cyberattack was carried out using IP addresses from the Ukrainian region. Following this event, he has consistently asserted that a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack caused the failure of X.
DDoS attacks represent a widespread strategy employed by cybercriminals to make a website or online service unavailable by inundating it with an excessive amount of traffic originating from numerous sources simultaneously. The aim is to deplete the target’s computational resources so severely that the network performance plummets dramatically, leading to slow operations and eventual downtime.
Related: Elon Musk shares surprising cause for X’s outage today
This explanation appears quite credible regarding the X attack, particularly since this isn’t the first instance where Musk has invoked the DDoS argument. Back in August 2024, during his live stream featuring then-U.S. President Donald Trump, which faced some tech issues, Musk commented, "It looks like there’s a significant DDoS attack happening on X."
Musk continues to employ this strategy to address his network’s latest service disruption. Although several specialists suggest that a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assault appears to be the probable cause, they voice concerns. They question why these most recent attacks proved effective if, as Musk asserts, X faces daily assaults.
A recent analysis from WIRED provides some potential answers.
Musk mentioned this was due to 'the significant resources involved,' however, independent security researcher Kevin Beaumont along with several other experts observed indications suggesting certain X source servers, responsible for handling web requests, lacked proper protection from the company’s Cloudflare DDoS defense system and remained exposed online.
If this is accurate, then Musk’s defensive mechanism at X might have contained notable vulnerabilities since intruders managed to take down the network. This indicates that had X’s management excelled in safeguarding their servers effectively, the cyber assault could potentially have been thwarted.
Additional proof indicates that Musk might be mistaken in asserting that Ukraine was behind the X cyberattack.
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WIRED points out that "analyses of DDoS traffic can dissect the flood of bogus data into various components, such as identifying the countries with the highest number of participating IP addresses" and references a researcher who stated that none of the top 20 sources of the attack originated from Ukrainian IPs.
The assault occurred at an extremely inconvenient time for Musk.
When the attack occurred, Musk probably hadn't devoted much time to X or Tesla. ( TSLA ) Or SpaceX. In recent months, he has concentrated on his role within the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), as shares of TSLA have continued to decline steadily, accumulating significant losses.
Related: Elon Musk faces further setbacks as the head of major technology company assumes control of his competitor.
It's difficult to overlook the irony in the recent assault on X, considering that DOGE has been letting go of crucial personnel from the U.S. government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—the organization tasked with safeguarding America’s digital infrastructure.
Jeff Le, who holds the position of Principal at 100 Mile Strategies This important point is highlighted. "The timing is notable, since the Trump Administration has significantly reduced staff at CISA and diminished their ability to safeguard broader critical infrastructure," he points out.
Lee emphasizes that prior to reaching any conclusions, an impartial evaluation must take place to genuinely assess the digital forensic evidence and artifacts resulting from the incident. Nevertheless, based on current information, mistakes made by Musk and his team at X appear to have contributed somewhat to the breach.
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