Musk blames X outages on alleged ‘massive’ cyberattack

The global outages impacting the social media platform X are being caused by a cyberattack, CEO Elon Musk said Monday after the app and website were down intermittently throughout the day.

“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,” he wrote, without providing more information.

X did not respond to requests for comment about the incident.

Alp Toker, director of internet monitor Netblocks, told Recorded Future News they have been observing a cycle of outages affecting X over the last six hours impacting the site’s availability globally. 

“This is amongst the longest Twitter outages tracked in terms of duration, and the pattern is consistent with a denial of service attack targeting X’s infrastructure at scale,” he said. “Latency has remained high, but services are returning to ordinary operation though it’s not clear that the issue has been fully mitigated at present.”

DDoS attacks overwhelm websites with a flood of traffic with the goal of knocking them offline. 

Musk has claimed in the past, without evidence, that cyberattacks were causing technological issues with features on the site, including when an interview with President Trump to be broadcast through the site was delayed last year. 

A group of hackers named Dark Storm Team took credit for the outages on Monday afternoon. The group offers distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for a fee and touts many of its politically-motivated attacks on its Telegram channel. 

In addition to alleged attacks on X, the group claimed it took down a government website of the United Arab Emirates on Monday. 

The group is one of several offering DDoS attacks for a price and did not provide evidence proving it was behind the outages affecting X. 

Law enforcement agencies around the world have repeatedly gone after DDoS-for-hire groups over the last year in a two-pronged effort to remove corrupted home appliances and routers from the botnets that amplify these attacks and to stop devastating attacks that knock critical websites offline. 

German police shut down a platform used to carry out DDoS attacks and arrested two men who allegedly operated the site in November while Europol announced a large operation in December that shut down 27 of the most popular platforms used to carry out DDoS attacks.

The U.S. Justice Department arrested and indicted two men in October for operating Anonymous Sudan, a group responsible for several large DDoS incidents. Their DDoS tool named “Godzilla,” which was offered as a service to other criminal groups, was also taken down as part of the DOJ operation.