Elon Musk may have been wrong about recent X cyberattacks | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

Friday, March 10, kicked off with an expected outage at X, rendering many users unable to access the platform for hours. Throughout the early morning hours, reports of the network being down flooded in from both the U.S. and 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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In a post addressing X, Musk attributed the outage to a cyberattack, implying it still had not stopped. He stated that it was likely done by a large group making a well-coordinated effort or an entire country, though no names were suggested.

Since then, experts have closely examined the alleged X cyberattack and provided context on Musk’s explanation. Based on their speculation, Musk’s story seems flawed in more ways than one.

Elon Musk recently offered an explanation as to what caused the X blackout but other experts aren’t so sure.

What caused the X outage? Experts disagree with Musk

Following the X outage, Musk appeared on Fox News and told host Larry Kudlow that the alleged cyberattack had been conducted with “IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” Since the incident, he has repeatedly claimed that a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack took X down.

A DDoS attack is a common tactic in which hackers render a digital platform inaccessible by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. This is meant to consume the system’s resources, causing the network services to operate extremely slowly and ultimately shut down.

This explanation certainly seems plausible in the case of the X attack, especially as it isn’t the first time Musk has tried to play the DDoS card. In August 2024, when his livestream with now U.S. President Donald Trump experienced technical difficulties, he stated, “There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X.”

Musk still uses this playbook today to explain his network’s recent outage. While some experts have noted that a DDoS attack seems to be a likely culprit, they raise some questions, noting that if X is “attacked every day,” as Musk claims, then why were the recent attacks so successful?

A recent analysis from WIRED provides some potential answers.

“Musk said it was because “this was done with a lot of resources,” it notes, “but independent security researcher Kevin Beaumont and other analysts see evidence that some X origin servers, which respond to web requests, weren’t properly secured behind the company’s Cloudflare DDoS protection and were publicly visible.”

If that is true, it seems that Musk’s defense system at X may have had some significant flaws, as it allowed attackers to successfully bring down the network. This suggests that if X’s leadership team had done a more effective job keeping their own servers secure, the cyberattack could have been prevented.

Further evidence suggests that Musk may be incorrect in his claim that Ukraine is responsible for the X cyberattack.

WIRED also notes that “DDoS traffic analysis can break down the firehose of junk traffic in different ways, including by listing the countries that had the most IP addresses involved in an attack” and cites a researcher who claims they did not see any Ukrainian IPs in the list of the attack’s top 20 origins.

The attack came at a highly inopportune time for Musk

At the time of the attack, Musk likely hadn’t spent much time at X, Tesla (TSLA) or SpaceX. Over the past few months, he’s been focused on his new position with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) while TSLA stock has consistently trended downward, racking up notable losses.

It is hard to ignore the irony of the recent attack on X, as DOGE has been laying off key members of the U.S. government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the group responsible for protecting the nation’s cyber assets.

Jeff Le, a Principal at 100 Mile Strategies, highlights this key detail. “The timing is interesting, as the Trump Administration has made significant staffing cuts to CISA and their capabilities to protect wider critical infrastructure,” he states.

Le adds that before any answers can be determined, an independent assessment will be necessary to truly evaluate the digital forensics and artifacts from the attack. However, as it stands, errors on the part of Musk and his team at X seem to be at least partially responsible for the attack.