The social platform X suffered several service disruptions on March 10, leaving tens of thousands of users unable to connect at different points during the day. Owner Elon Musk attributed the failures to a heavily resourced cyberattack, but the supplied evidence showed that independent experts could not verify either the responsible party or its location.
Outage reports rose around 6 a.m. Eastern time and again near 10 a.m., according to Downdetector. More than 40,000 people reported losing access during the larger spikes. A further disruption began around noon and continued for at least an hour, with the strongest effects reported along the United States coasts. Reports later fell into the low thousands.
Downdetector’s breakdown assigned 56% of reported problems to the X application and 33% to the website. Those figures reflected user submissions rather than technical records from the company, but they documented the scale and recurrence of the access problems.
Musk wrote on X that the platform faces attacks every day and claimed this episode involved unusually substantial resources. He suggested that either a coordinated organization or a country might be involved. During a later Fox Business Network appearance, he referred to internet addresses from the Ukraine area, without releasing the underlying technical data.
Security specialists cautioned against treating an IP address as proof of origin. Researcher Kevin Beaumont said traffic came from around the world and described it as a variant of the Mirai botnet, a network that can use compromised cameras. Allan Liska of Recorded Future similarly explained that even a set of Ukrainian addresses could represent hijacked devices operated by someone elsewhere.
Nicholas Reese, who teaches cyber operations at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs, said a firm conclusion would require access to X’s data. He considered a state operation unlikely on the evidence available because the interruptions were brief, conspicuous and of limited apparent value. Reese noted that a group seeking visibility could have caused the outage, while leaving open the possibility of later activity.
No technical disclosure from X was included in the supplied account. That absence meant Musk’s characterization remained an allegation rather than an established explanation.
The disruption recalled service problems in March 2023, when the platform was still widely called Twitter and users encountered broken links, login failures and missing images for more than an hour. On March 10, 2025, discussion of the new outage also spread to rival platform Bluesky. The central verified event was therefore the repeated loss of service; attribution remained unresolved.
