Elon Musk Says X Hit By ‘Massive Cyber Attack’: Either a ‘Large Group’ Or ‘Country is Involved’
Elon Musk said Monday’s international X outage was the work of either a “large group” of people or a state-sanctioned cyber attack.
The announcement from the platform’s owner came amid hours of rolling outages from the US to the UK – and elsewhere.
Early Monday, users began to report issues with X by the thousands. Those numbers grew as morning turned to afternoon, with some reporting total outages and others experiencing intermittent service issues.
On Monday afternoon, X appeared to be running smoothly, and Musk said the issues were the result of the platform having been targeted.
An account posted, “First, protests against DOGE. Then, Tesla stores were attacked. Now, X is down. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that this downtime is the result of an attack on X.
Musk replied, “There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X. We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing ….”
X experienced three waves of outages throughout Monday, per reports to the website Downdetector.
Those outages hit their peaks at 4:45 a.m., 8:54 a.m., and 11:54 a.m. The last outage lasted well over two hours.
X users who reported issues were using both the platform’s mobile app and web browsers.
There were unverified, early reports that a hacking group calling itself Dark Storm was behind a DDoS attack meant to knock X offline. Those reports were not confirmed by Musk.
A DDoS attack, according to Microsoft, paralyzes servers by flooding them with fake traffic:
A DDoS attack targets websites and servers by disrupting network services in an attempt to exhaust an application’s resources. The perpetrators behind these attacks flood a site with errant traffic, resulting in poor website functionality or knocking it offline altogether. These types of attacks are on the rise.
DDoS attacks are wide-reaching, targeting all sorts of industries and company sizes worldwide. Certain industries, such as gaming, ecommerce, and telecommunications, are targeted more than others. DDoS attacks are some of the most common cyberthreats, and they can potentially compromise your business, online security, sales, and reputation.
