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Tesla owner and now right-hand man of US President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, has announced that outages on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) were the result of a cyber attack.
Based on DownDetector reports, outages peaked at over 38,000 simultaneous reports in the US, although the outage seemed to be sporadic, with operations resuming after roughly 45 minutes and then going down again for another 45 minutes. One instance of the outage lasted for a number of hours.
Outside of the US, users in India, France, Australia and more were also affected.
Musk said the cyber attack was one that came from a source with a lot of capability and suggested that it may be from either an established hacking group or a nation-state actor.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏,” wrote Musk on the social media 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.”
Musk added that X was “tracing” the source of the attack. Speaking with Fox News, he claimed that the cyber attack came from IP addresses in Ukraine.
According to Recorded Future’s Allan Liska, this was most likely a botnet of compromised devices and that even if “every IP address that hit Twitter today originated from Ukraine”, the botnet could be located anywhere.
Additionally, the cyber attack has been claimed by the Dark Storm hacking group, which refers to itself as a hacktivist operation.
In a post to BlueSky, a user by the name of “Puck Arts” claimed that a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group claimed the X outage.
“#DarkStorm has confirmed that the DDOS attack against Twitter will continue throughout the day as a protest against Musk and Trump,” said the user, adding that the outages were to last at least four more hours.
“Due to Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump’s blatant fascism and lack of humanity we as a digital army for the people will continue our peaceful DDOS protests against X formerly known as Twitter. Thank you for your love and support,” the user said in another post.
Dark Storm’s alleged cyber attack comes as Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) policies create increased frustration in the US, sparking live protests at Tesla dealerships across the country on the weekend.
Speaking with Cyber Daily, Jake Moore, global security advisor at ESET, said distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are used as they are easier to launch and remain anonymous.
“Cyber criminals attack from all angles and are incredibly fearless in their attempts. DDoS attacks are a clever way of targeting a company without having to hack into the mainframe, and the perpetrators can remain largely anonymous.
“This makes it that much more difficult to protect from when the landscape is completely unknown apart from having generic DDoS protection. However, even with such protection, each year, threat actors become better equipped and use even more IP addresses such as home IoT devices to flood systems, making it increasingly more difficult to protect from,” Moore said.
These attacks are often popular with hacktivists whose goal is to cause public issue with groups they are protesting against.
Dark Storm is no different. The group has claimed a number of DDoS attacks against “targets both inside Israel and out”.
According to the group’s Telegram channel, Dark Storm originally launched DDoS attacks against victims who supported Ukraine in its conflict with Russia during 2023, but it has since moved to a hacker-for-hire model, not unlike other groups like the now quiet “Anonymous Sudan”.
Dark Storm targets have included a number of US airports, the Israeli government and more.
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