Elon Musk, the billionaire and head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), stated on Tuesday that his social media platform, X (formerly known as Twitter), experienced a "massive cyberattack" from the "Ukraine area." On Monday, the platform faced multiple outages, repeatedly going offline, returning and crashing.

During a conversation with  Larry Kudlow on Fox News, Musk said, "We're not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area." When he was asked about the status of the platform, Musk responded, "It's up." The hacker group Dark Storm Team, which supports the Palestinian cause, has claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack on X, as announced on a public Telegram channel. This group is known for targeting nations and organisations that back Israel’s military actions in Gaza, which were launched in response to Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

In an earlier post on X, Musk said a powerful cyberattack caused the outage."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," he claimed.

A cybersecurity expert questioned the claim about "a lot of resources" being used in the attack, pointing out that small groups or individuals often carry out denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The platform X experienced major outages, with Downdetector recording a peak of 39,021 affected users in the U.S. by 10 a.m. ET. By 5 p.m., the reported issues had dropped to around 1,500. An anonymous source from the internet infrastructure sector told Reuters that X was hit by multiple waves of DoS attacks starting at 9:45 UTC. These attacks, which work by overwhelming websites with fake traffic, can be highly disruptive even if they are not very advanced.

The outages occurred as Elon Musk, an adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, continued to criticise Ukraine’s war strategy against Russia. Musk recently stated that Ukraine’s front line "would collapse" without his Starlink satellite service but reassured that he would not cut off access. In response to criticism on X, Musk defended his position on Ukraine, addressing accusations that he was focusing on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rather than Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"I literally challenged Putin to one-on-one combat over Ukraine, and my Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army," Musk stated. "Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off. What I am sickened by is years of slaughter in a stalemate that Ukraine will inevitably lose," he further said.