Elon Musk has blamed widespread disruptions on his social media platform X on a “massive cyberattack,” which he claimed was orchestrated by a “large, coordinated group” or country.
Tens of thousands of users globally reported intermittent outages on X overnight, according to the monitoring website Down Detector. New posts were failing to load for users in countries including the US, UK, France and India at various points throughout Monday. The service disruptions lasted a few minutes each.
Elon Musk during a Cabinet meeting with at the White House last month,Credit: AP
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 in a post on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
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.
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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 similarly blamed a “massive” cyberattack for the delay of a conversation between himself and then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on X.
At that time, he described the attack, 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.
