Quote:Experts have cast doubt on Elon Musk's claim that a large-scale outage which hit X was caused by hackers in Ukraine.
Platform monitor Downdetector says it had more than 1.6 million reports of problems with the social media site from users around the world on Monday.
"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 the Fox Business channel.
However, Ciaran Martin, professor at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government told the BBC that explanation was "wholly unconvincing" and "pretty much garbage."
Prof Martin - former head of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre - says it looks as if X was targeted by what's known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, where hackers flood a server with internet traffic to prevent users from connecting to a website.
"It's not that sophisticated - it's a very old technique," Mr Martin told Radio 4's Today programme.
"I can't think of a company of the size and standing internationally of X that's fallen over to a DDoS attack for a very long time," he added.
He said the incident at X "doesn't reflect well on their cyber security."
Many users trying to access the platform and refresh feeds on its app and desktop site during Monday's outages were met with a loading icon.
Musk, who has been a frequent critic of Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelensky, has offered no evidence to support his claim and did not say whether or not he thought state actors were involved.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62x5k44rl0o
If Ukraine/Ukrainians did do it, good for them.
