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ELON Musk has blamed a “massive cyberattack from Ukraine” after X users were hit by another giant worldwide outage.
The X chairman appeared to point the finger at the war-torn nation while being interviewed about the major disruption to the social media platform.
When asked about the outage, he said: “We’re not sure exactly what happened but there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”
Disgruntled users have been left unable to message or post on the popular platform, formerly known as Twitter, with thousands of individuals reporting disruption online.
While IP addresses may indicate the cyberattack came from Ukraine, this may not be definitive as the unique identifying numbers of an IP address can be masked and changed to appear from different locations.
Musk’s claims may also be contentious as hacker group “Dark Storm Team” has claimed responsibility for the attack, admitting so in a public post on Telegram.
The hacker group primarily targets key business sectors in Israel and NATO member countries.
Last month, it vowed to launch cyberattacks on the government websites of NATO nations, Israel, and any other nation that supports it.
The group is known for sophisticated cyber warfare and has successfully breached high-security systems in the past.
Musk, who is serving as Senior Adviser to US President Trump, has supported the leader in his withdrawal of all military aid to Ukraine.
Last month, he also lashed out at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, labelling him as a dictator in a fiery social media rant.
The Tesla boss attacked the Ukrainian president as he challenged him to hold a presidential election to prove his popularity.
Musk first posted about today’s X outage on the social media platform on Monday afternoon, seemingly indicating that a “large, coordinated” group was involved.
He said: “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…”
Tech website Downdetector has been bombarded with over 8,000 new reports after X faced problems earlier today.
Many of those already logged in on the app and website have been presented with the message: “Something went wrong, try reloading.”
Earlier, the outage site announced: “User reports indicate problems at X.”
Since 9.25am today, complaints have skyrocketed with 10,883 reports of X outages on the website.
Downdector provides real-time updates about the performance of online services.
The site only reports an incident when the number of problem reports is significantly higher than usual.
Before 9am there were no reported issues with X.
Most of the issues were reported in major cities, including London and Birmingham in the UK, as well as New York and Los Angeles in the US.
Many people have been forced onto Facebook or Threads, the rival platform owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s company Meta, to complain about the issues at X.
Users have taken to Facebook to warn others that the platform is down, sharing their concerns.
One wrote: “Can’t access.”
Another added: “Yeah, what happened?”
A third ominously responded: “So it begins.”
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion before renaming it to X and forming his own company – X Corp – to run it, replacing Twitter Inc.
He also started charging users for a “premium” version of the platform.
This includes key features like edit tweet, longer video uploads and longer posts (up to 25,000 characters).
Earlier this month Downdetector reported that more than 5,038 people encountered problems with Barclays.
Customers frantically reported that they were unable to log into their mobile banking app and internet banking services.
More than 50 per cent of the reported problems related to difficulties with mobile banking and the bank quickly scrambled to resolve the issue.
Thankfully Barclays said the outage was caused by a technical issue and was not related to a cyber attack or any malicious activity.
