Twitter outage blamed on cyberattack

Elon Musk 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 on Monday, according to the monitoring website Downdetector.

New posts were failing to load for users in countries including the US, UK, France and India at various points throughout the day. The service disruptions lasted a few minutes each.

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.

In an interview on Fox Business, he said the cyberattack was intended to take down X “with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”

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. 

A spokesperson for X did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It is difficult to quickly determine the source of a cyber incident, as attackers often use techniques to mask their location.

In the case of distributed denial-of-service attacks, or DDoS, the attacks are carried out by compromised devices controlled by the hackers, not the hackers themselves. 

A person familiar with the investigation confirmed that the disruption was caused by a cyberattack. It doesn’t appear to be a DDoS attack, but the inquiry is ongoing, the person said.

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.