On Monday, the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced significant outages that impacted a large number of users. Elon Musk, the owner of the platform, indicated that these disruptions could be attributed to a "massive cyberattack," claiming involvement from a "large, coordinated group and/or a country." He made these assertions through various posts on X and during an interview with Fox Business Network.
In a Fox appearance, Musk highlighted "IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area" as a potential clue in identifying the source of the attack. According to outage tracking website Downdetector.com, the first incident saw over 21,000 reports of issues from users in the U.S. and 10,800 from the U.K. The platform seemed to return to normal around 5:30 a.m. EST, having been down for approximately 45 minutes.
Later that day, X experienced another outage, with Downdetector.com recording over 8,000 reports at 9:45 a.m. EST. Similar to the earlier incident, service was restored after about 45 minutes, but the platform went down again shortly after. The peak of outage complaints reached around 40,000, with users encountering messages stating that “something went wrong” and advising them to try reloading.
As this situation develops, a pro-Palestinian hacker group named "Dark Storm Team" has also been mentioned in connection with claims of responsibility for a DDoS attack on X.