Elon Musk Says Disruptions on Social Media Platform X Due to Cyber Attack

On Monday, February 20, the social media platform X experienced intermittent disruptions, which Elon Musk, the owner of the platform, attributed to a widespread and unusual cyber attack. Musk wrote on X: "We are targeted every day, but this time the attacks have been carried out using many resources. A large and coordinated group or a country is involved." He did not elaborate on the "many resources"; however, Reuters reported that some cybersecurity experts stated that smaller groups could also conduct such denial-of-service attacks. According to reports from media monitoring website statuses, X experienced outages on Monday, peaking at 10 AM Eastern Time, when 39,021 users in the United States were unable to access the platform. Reuters cited an informed source in the internet industry stating that X had been targeted by several waves of denial-of-service cyber attacks starting at 4:45 AM Eastern Time on Monday. A DoS cyber attack, referred to in Persian as "محروم‌سازی از سرویس" or "service denial," targets the website by artificially saturating it with traffic. According to Reuters, these types of attacks are not necessarily complex but can cause severe disruptions. Hours later, Musk stated in an interview with Fox Business that these cyber attacks originated from IP addresses linked to Ukraine. Ukrainian officials have not yet commented on this, but Reuters noted that traces of the IP addresses that bombarded X with traffic have also been found in the United States, Vietnam, Brazil, and other countries. Elon Musk, a senior advisor to former U.S. President Donald Trump, has recently made strong criticisms against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He stated on Sunday that without Starlink satellite communication services, the front lines in Ukraine would "disappear." However, as the owner of Starlink, he assured that access to this internet service would not be cut off for Ukraine.