Musk blames ‘massive cyberattack’ for series of outages on X

Charles Capel

Jeff Stone

Bloomberg

Elon Musk blamed widespread disruptions on his social media platform <a href="https://fortune.com/company/twitter/" target="_blank">X</a> on a “massive cyberattack,” which he claimed was orchestrated by a “large, coordinated group” or country.<div class="paywall-selector"></div><div class="paywall">



Tens of thousands of users globally reported intermittent outages on X on Monday, according to the monitoring&nbsp;<a href="https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">website</a>&nbsp;Down Detector. New posts were failing to load for users in countries including the US, UK, France and India at various points throughout the day. The service disruptions lasted a few minutes each.



Musk later acknowledged that the platform had experienced a site-wide disruption. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” he wrote&nbsp;<a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1899149509407473825" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">in a post on X</a>, the site formerly known as Twitter.&nbsp;



Dark Storm, a pro-Palestinian ‘hacktivist’ group, took credit for the attack via its Telegram page, but has not provided proof that it was behind the disruptions. A representative for Dark Storm told Bloomberg News that the attack was part of a wider hacktivist effort against Israel.&nbsp;



A spokesperson for X did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 



This isn’t the first time Musk has cited a cyberattack for disruptions on his social media platform. Last year, Musk&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-13/musk-blames-cyber-attack-for-delayed-start-of-trump-conversation" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">similarly blamed</a>&nbsp;a “massive” cyberattack for the delay of a conversation between himself and then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on X.



At that time, he&nbsp;<a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1823152153445404990" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">described the attack</a>, without evidence, as a distributed denial-of-service, or DDOS, attack. A DDOS attack involves hackers flooding a site with more internet traffic than it can handle to overload its servers and other operations.</div>

Tens of thousands of users globally reported intermittent outages on X on Monday, according to the monitoring website Down Detector.

Musk blames 'massive cyberattack' for series of outages on X

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