What caused the X outage that Musk is blaming on Ukraine?

Social media platform X was hit by a series of outages yesterday in what its owner Elon Musk has called a “massive cyberattack” stemming from Ukraine. Analysts believe the disruption was caused by botnets — but finding the culprits will be a tall order.  

The outages began at around 14:00 CET and lasted for most of the afternoon, trailing off at around 18:00, according to Down Detector. While the outages appeared to have flatlined overnight, there was an uptick in reports of downtime starting from 08:00AM today up until the time of writing.

“We’re not sure exactly what happened,” Musk said during a Fox Business interview. “But there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” 

In a separate post on X, Musk said: “We get attacked every day, but this ...