If you were one of the many people endlessly refreshing your X feed on Monday (10th March, 2025) morning, wondering if you’d been personally unplugged from the digital world, you weren’t alone!
Elon Musk’s social media platform, X (formerly known as Twitter), suffered a major outage that sent users in the US and UK into a frenzy.
According to Downdetector, thousands of users reported issues, with over 8,000 outage complaints coming from the UK just before 14:00 GMT.
Some unlucky users were still locked out well into the afternoon, staring at the dreaded loading icon of doom.
Musk’s Cyber Attack Claim – Fact or Fiction?
Elon Musk wasted no time in pointing fingers, claiming the outage was caused by a “massive cyber-attack” originating from “the Ukraine area.”
However, Musk—who’s been openly critical of Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelensky—provided no hard evidence to back up his explosive claim.
In a post on X, he suggested that “either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”
Later, in an interview on Fox Business Network’s Kudlow, he doubled down, saying the attackers had “IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” But what does that actually mean?
Experts Weigh In: ‘Advanced Persistent Teenagers’ at Work?
Cybersecurity experts were quick to pump the brakes on Musk’s theory.
Security researcher Kevin Beaumont chimed in on Bluesky, pointing out that Musk was “missing a key fact — it was actually IPs from worldwide, not just Ukraine.”
Beaumont suggested the attack was likely carried out using a Mirai botnet—a network of compromised internet-connected devices, like hacked cameras, used to flood a platform with traffic.
And his best guess as to who’s responsible? “Smells of APTs — advanced persistent teenagers.” Yes, you read that right.
So, What Actually Happened?
The outage appeared to be a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack—an old-school hacking trick where a flood of traffic overwhelms a site and knocks it offline.
Musk has made previous claims about DDoS attacks targeting X, though none have been officially confirmed.
Whether this was an international cyber conspiracy or just a bunch of mischievous hackers with too much time on their hands remains up for debate.
But one thing’s for sure: millions of X users had a rough Monday morning, forced to—gasp—find other ways to entertain themselves.
So, did the internet’s favorite billionaire just uncover a major cyber warfare plot, or is this another case of Musk being Musk?
