Musk Claims “Massive Cyberattack” Responsible for X Outages, Dark Storm Takes Credit

X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, was taken offline multiple times on March 10 as a result of a coordinated DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. Users in India began reporting that the website and app were down at around 3pm IST on Monday, with the disruption lasting for about an hour. However, after being restored briefly, the website and app were again largely inaccessible between 6pm and 1am on Tuesday morning, with intermittent periods of normal operation. Users reported that they were unable to sign in to their accounts, they were unable to post, and fresh content was not loading on their timelines.

In between, CEO Elon Musk managed to post a message saying “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.” to his own account. He later appeared for an interview on American TV channel Fox News, claiming that IP addresses linked to the attack originated “in the Ukraine area”.

However even before Musk pointed the finger at Ukraine, an online “hacktivist” protest group called Dark Storm Team took credit for the attacks. The group, which first appeared online in 2023 and has previously acted out of a pro-Palestine ideological agenda, targeting Israeli and NATO-affiliated businesses and online infrastructure. It also sells DDoS attacks as a service online, often coordinating and publishing updates on Telegram.

Some early reports and social media posts credited the better-known Anonymous hacktivist collective with the attack, although it now appears that this was not the case. 

The status of X was largely back to normal by 2am IST on Tuesday, with only minimal reports of disruption tapering off over the next hour, as shown by DownDetector. Musk has not made any further comments and X has not released any official statement.