Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, suffered a major outage on Monday (March 10), and the newly appointed close adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump has pointed the finger at Ukraine.
X users logged in on Monday to discover that they could not load posts, and embed features remain disrupted even at the time of writing.
“We’re not sure exactly what happened but there was a massive cyber-attack to try and bring down the X system with IP [Internet Protocol] addresses originating in the Ukraine area,” Musk said in an interview with Fox Business.
Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has made no secret of his disdain for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Yet, Ukraine’s military remains deeply reliant on Starlink—Musk’s satellite network, owned by his company SpaceX—to orchestrate its operations against Russia.
Hours after the outage, Musk called Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly a “traitor” in a post on X after Kelly said he had visited Ukraine over the weekend.
“Everyone wants this war to end, but any agreement has to protect Ukraine’s security and can’t be a giveaway to Putin,” Kelly wrote alongside images of his visit to the war-torn European country.
In a reply to the thread, Musk responded, “You are a traitor.”
Zelenskyy visited the White House last month to finalize a mineral deal and attempt to try and broker peace with Trump’s administration, which has so far sided with Russia in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
The visit was hailed as a major “diplomatic failure,” with tensions between Zelenskyy and Washington at an all-time high.
The U.S. has frozen military aid and intelligence-sharing with Kyiv, signaling a shift in priorities. However, a Ukrainian delegation is set to meet top Trump officials in Saudi Arabia for peace negotiations.
Kelly responded, informing Musk that defending is a “basic tenet of what makes America great.”
“He said he’s slashed and burned the federal government to make room for a giant tax cut for billionaires like himself,” Kelly later added. “I’ve sworn an oath to this country. I’ve flown in combat. I’ve served in the Navy for 25 years. It appears to me the oath that Elon Musk stands by is the oath to billionaires—make their lives easier, not the American people, not veterans. I mean, he’s firing workers at VA hospitals. He’s not a serious guy. He should go back to building rockets.”
