White House Senior Advisor Elon Musk announced Monday that X, the social media platform he rebranded from Twitter, is grappling with a “massive cyberattack,” causing intermittent outages throughout the day. The billionaire tech mogul, now a key figure in the Trump administration, pointed to a sophisticated assault that he suggested could involve a nation-state, with IP addresses traced to the Ukraine area.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk posted on the platform at 10:25 a.m. PDT. “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 host Larry Kudlow, Musk elaborated, stating that the attack’s origins appeared to stem from Ukraine-based IP addresses, though he stopped short of definitively naming a culprit.
The hacker group Dark Storm Team claimed responsibility for the attack, according to Newsweek, which reported the group’s announcement via Telegram. Known for its pro-Palestinian stance and previous targeting of Israel and its allies, the group’s involvement adds a geopolitical layer to the incident.
The outage, identified as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, overwhelmed X’s servers with a flood of internet traffic, rendering the site inaccessible for many users. Cloudflare, a cybersecurity firm, describes DDoS attacks as deliberate efforts to disrupt normal operations by inundating systems with requests, often via malware-infected devices.
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The cyber assault comes amid heightened scrutiny of Musk, whose role as co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a Trump administration initiative to streamline federal operations—has thrust him further into the political spotlight.
Proposed during the 2024 campaign, DOGE was formalized on November 12, with Musk initially paired with Vivek Ramaswamy, who stepped down January 20 to pursue Ohio’s governorship. Musk’s support for President Donald Trump has also sparked backlash, with protests at Tesla dealerships over his political alignment.
X users experienced multiple disruptions Monday, with Downdetector logging tens of thousands of outage reports, peaking at over 40,000 in the U.S. alone. The attack’s scale echoes previous DDoS campaigns, such as those targeting Ukrainian systems before Russia’s 2022 invasion, raising questions about potential state-sponsored motives.
Musk, who acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 with a vision of fostering a “common digital town square,” per the Wall Street Journal, has faced recurring technical challenges on the platform, including a notable outage during a 2024 Trump interview.
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As X engineers work to restore full service, the incident underscores the vulnerabilities of even the most prominent digital platforms—and the complex interplay of technology, politics, and global tensions. Musk’s team continues to trace the attack’s origins, with the White House yet to comment officially on the matter.
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