Cyber Attackers Strike X

Uploaded on 2025-03-11 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Social Media, NEWS-Cybersecurity News, FREE TO VIEW

Elon Musk says that the social media platform X (previously called Twitter) has been cyber attacked and thousands of users in the UK and US reported outages. According to data from tracking website Downdetector at least than 40,000 users reported they could not access X throughout Monday 10th March,

Musk, who has owned X since late 2022, thinks the attack could continue. "There was (still is) a massive cyber attack against X," Musk said in a post on the platform. "We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources". He said that "either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved".

This has happened after the outage monitor Downdetector said it had witnessed tens of thousands of messages from US users saying they had serious technical issues - there were thousands of UK outage reports from UK on Monday 10th March as well. Many users trying to access the platform and refresh feeds on its app and desktop site during the outages, but couldn’t.

Musk has previously claimed that the platform has been targeted by DDoS attacks in an attempt to take a website offline by overwhelming it with Internet traffic. DDOS is typically used to cause a disruption, which also makes confirming the source of these types of attacks more difficult.

After Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion the majority of employees left or were fired, raising concerns about whether staffing was in place to maintain the social media platform.

In addition to unhappy ex-employees, ther are numerous others with the motivation to attack Elon Musk, not least others in US government agencies threatened by Musk's leadership of a government efficiency drive.

There has been speculation about the involvement of cyber criminal groups, including DarkStorm or Lapsu$, the Anonymous hacking collective. Another possible source of the attack could lie in Ukarine, which has suffered in its war efforts with Russia by Musk's ownership of the Starlink communication network, used by the Ukraine military.

Image: Ideogram

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