Was it a cyberattack that led to global outage of X? Security researchers doubt Elon Musk’s claims

One day after X suffered a prolonged outage, security researchers are casting doubt on Elon Musk’s claims about who was responsible for the disruption.

On Monday, as X struggled to stay online, Musk took to the platform, alleging that a “massive cyberattack” was behind the outage. He claimed the attack was carried out by a “large, coordinated group and/or a country.” Later, in an interview with Fox News, he suggested the attack involved IP addresses from the Ukraine region.

However, Musk provided no evidence to support his claims, and a new report from Wired paints a very different picture. According to security experts cited in the report, there is little indication that Ukrainian IP addresses played a significant role in the attack. One researcher even stated that Ukraine wasn’t among the top 20 countries involved in the attack’s origins.

The report also suggests that X’s own security flaws may have left the platform vulnerable. The report notes that X’s origin servers, which handle web requests, were not properly secured behind the company’s Cloudflare DDoS protection and were publicly visible. This oversight allowed attackers to target them directly. X has since corrected the issue, securing its servers, according to the researchers.