Outlook Business Desk
Elon Musk's social media platform X experienced disruption on March 10, preventing thousands of users from accessing the app or website. The platform went down twice in a single day, amid of a potential security breach.
Musk stated that X faced a "massive cyberattack". He wrote " There has been a major cyberattack on X. While we face attacks daily this one involved significant resource. It appears to be the work of either a well-organized group or a nation. We are investigating".
The hacking group "Dark Storm Team" took responsibility for the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on X through a Telegram post, reported by Newsweek. They shared a screenshot of a real-time connectivity status page showing failed connection attempts from multiple global locations claiming they had taken X offline.
Dark Storm Team was founded in 2023. The group is recognised for its sophisticated cyber warfare tactics & successful infiltrations of high security systems. According to Orange Cyberdefense the group aligns with a pro-Palestinian agenda and has vowed to carry out cyberattacks against government websites of NATO countries, Israel & other nations backing Israel.
In an interview with Larry Kudlow, Elon Musk hinted that Ukraine might be responsible for the cyberattack on X mentioning that large-scale attack targeted the platform with IP addresses traced back to the Ukraine region.
Elon Musk come amid growing US-Ukraine tensions after a heated Trump-Zelenskyy exchange. He shared reports of USAID- backed Ukrainian groups "blacklisting" Trump officials. Despite disagreements on Ukraine policy Musk confirmed Starlink services would remain active.
According to Downdetector.com, X faced widespread disruptions at around 5:40 a.m. ET on Monday. Although service was restored later that morning another outage occurred around 10 a.m. ET. The disruption affected multiple regions including India, the US, UK, Australia & others.
X has experienced downtime on multiple occasions in the past including several instances last year. However, the recent outage has been more significant lasting longer than previous disruptions.