A day after X (formerly Twitter) faced a major outage that left users in Pakistan and across the globe unable to access the platform, new findings suggest the issue may not have been the result of a foreign cyberattack as Elon Musk claimed.
As reported earlier by ProPakistani, Downdetector showed a spike in outage reports around 1:45 PM Pakistan time, with users — including our team at ProPakistani — experiencing issues loading posts, timelines, and profiles. The disruption came shortly after Musk attributed the downtime to a “massive cyberattack” allegedly involving either a large coordinated group or a nation-state, later claiming the IP addresses originated from the “Ukraine area.”
However, cybersecurity experts have pushed back against that narrative. A detailed report from Wired cites multiple researchers who say there’s no clear evidence linking Ukraine to the attack. One expert reported that Ukraine didn’t even rank among the top 20 countries associated with the DDoS traffic.
Additionally, security professionals revealed that the problem might have stemmed from X’s infrastructure vulnerabilities. Reports indicate that X’s origin servers were initially left exposed and unprotected by Cloudflare’s DDoS mitigation system, allowing attackers to target them directly. The company has since secured these servers.
This isn’t the first time Musk has blamed mysterious cyberattacks for platform failures. In a previous incident last year involving a failed livestream with Donald Trump, he made similar claims, but fact-checkers later debunked them.
While X has yet to issue an official explanation, the evidence so far suggests that technical misconfigurations, not a foreign adversary, may have caused the outage. Thankfully, the platform seems to be stabilized once again. Let us know in the comments if Twitter/X is working properly for you.