- A sustained cyberattack is now being claimed as the reason why X suffered so many brief worldwide outages on Monday.
- Owner Elon Musk is blaming hackers that may be from Ukraine.
- However independent cybercriminal organisation Dark Storm has claimed that it was behind the attacks.
It was a spotty Monday for connectivity at X, the former Twitter, as the social media platform experienced several brief outages for most of the day, starting from around 10 AM CAT, and continuing into the evening.
While a major worldwide outage is a rarity for X, according to the owner of the platform, Elon Musk, the downtimes were caused by a sustained cyberattack with enough resources to bypass its security. Users took to rival social networks like Bluesky to ask others if they were also experiencing difficulties using X.
According to Musk, there was a “massive cyberattack against X” which resulted in the difficulties in trying to use the platform.
“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,” he tweeted.
In a separate interview with Fox Business, Musk said that the team at X is “not sure exactly what happened. But there was a massive cyberattack to try and bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”
This may seem like an obvious choice for a threat actor, as Musk and his best buddy US President Donald Trump shifted the narrative on Ukraine within the last month, from ally to enemy despite the fact that it was Russia that invaded the country and not vice versa.
Following this was a public ambush on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by Trump and other Republican politicians in the White House all but decimating any good will remaining between the US and Ukraine.
However blaming the X cyberattack and subsequent outage on Ukraine is unfounded. Firstly, Musk has yet to give any real evidence of this and secondly, the Dark Storm hacker group has already taken credit for the attacks.
“Twitter has been taken offline by Dark Storm Team,” the alleged hackers claimed on Telegram. Dark Storm is a widespread team of hackers believed to comprise of members from many different countries with unconfirmed and potentially strong links to Russia.
They often engage in hacktivism and have a pro-Palestine objectives, which makes Musk and his increasingly right-wing and Israel-supporting platform a clear target. Luckily for Musk and team it seems the brunt of the attacks is over, as per DownDetector, the outages have calmed since yesterday evening.
