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Elon Musk-owned social media platform X faced a major outage on Monday, March 10, and the billionaire was quick to share a post alleging that a cyberattack caused it.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X. 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,” he said.
The outage began at around 3.15 pm IST and caused significant disruption to the platform across the world, but it was back after around two hours.
Musk, in an interview with Fox News, stated, “We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” However, he has not shared any concrete evidence in this regard.
In another X post on March 9, he had said, “My Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off,” a statement that has been said to have angered Ukraine-based hackers and possibly even prompted them to launch a cyberattack on X.
According to Downdetector.com, over 40,000 users reported issues related to X, during which the platform became inaccessible on both the web and the app. The services were partially restored in around two hours, although Musk claims that there is still an active cyberattack targeting the X system, which is in line with reports on Downdetector.com.
The continuous nature of the cyberattack suggests that it is a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, a tactic used to bring down a website or a digital service by overwhelming it with excess traffic and malicious requests, which can either slow down or even completely shut down the system, making it inaccessible for everyone.
