Pierluigi Paganini
March 10, 2025
A major cyber attack appears to be the root cause of the global outage on X, according to its CEO Elon Musk. About 40,000 users reported issues accessing Twitter, according to Downdetector.com. Musk has provided no evidence to support his claims, and this is not the first time. Last year, he attributed the delay in broadcasting an interview with Trump to another alleged cyberattack, which he never substantiated.
Musk speculates that the alleged attack was carried out by a well-resourced group like a nation-state actor.
“This is amongst the longest Twitter outages tracked in terms of duration, and the pattern is consistent with a denial of service attack targeting X’s infrastructure at scale,” Alp Toker, director of internet monitor Netblocks, told Recorded Future News. “Latency has remained high, but services are returning to ordinary operation though it’s not clear that the issue has been fully mitigated at present.”
The outage lasted intermittently for several hours, the effects are consistent with a massive DDoS attack.
A pro-Palestinian hacktivist group named Dark Storm Team claimed responsibility for the cyber attack against X. The group provides DDoS-for-hire service and frequently promotes politically motivated attacks on its Telegram channel. Today, the group also claimed to have taken down a UAE government website. However, Dark Storm Team has yet to provide any evidence confirming its involvement in X’s outages.
The group claimed on their Telegram channel that they were targeting X with DDoS attacks causing widespread outages. The hacktivists published screenshots of check-host.net connectivity tests [1, 2] as proof of the ongoing DDoS attacks.
On the other hand, Elon Musk linked the alleged cyber attack to Ukraine. Elon Musk claimed that IP addresses from the cyber attack traced back to the Ukraine area.
“Later on Monday, Mr Musk claimed on Fox News that IP addresses involved in the cyber attack were traced to locations “in the Ukraine area”.” reported Sky News.
This occurred as the US government had recently revoked some satellite imagery access for Ukraine and paused intelligence sharing, adding pressure on Kyiv amidst President Trump’s calls for a quick resolution to the Russia-Ukraine war.
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(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Dark Storm Team)
