Twitter (aka X) Briefly Taken Down by Massive Attack

Dark Storm Team labeled culprits in early reports 

Elon Musk’s social platform X, formerly known as Twitter, was briefly down Monday due to what Musk called a “massive cyberattack.”

At 12:25 pm, Musk tweeted:

“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.

Tracing…”

Early reports implicated a group of cyberterrorists, Dark Storm Team, who allegedly claimed responsibility for the attack on a public Telegram channel.

Data from Downdetector revealed that the attack began around 5:00 am and peaked between 10:00 and 11:00 am. At its highest, roughly 40,000 outages were reported, indicating that the actual number of person affected was much higher.

By midafternoon the platform appeared to have largely recovered from the attack despite the attack being ongoing.

Dark Storm Team has previously been implicated in attacks on X (Twitter), Los Angeles, International Airport (LAX), Haifi Port in Israel and the UAE’s Ministry of defense. The group, which advertises hacking services on Telegram, is said to be pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel and anti-American.

This is a developing story

Update:

Monday afternoon, Musk told Fox Business Network that:

”Well, we're not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyber attack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”

Following Ukrainian President Zelensky’s unsuccessful meeting (and expulsion from the White House) recently, Musk described Zelensky as “evil,” saying:

“Zelensky wants a forever war, a never-ending graft meat grinder. This is evil.“

Despite Musk’s earlier statement suggesting that a country might be involved, there is no evidence at this time that the Ukrainian government was involved in Monday’s attack.

The cyberattack came on the heels of series of protests against Musk’s Tesla corporation, which Musk has claimed were funded by ActBlue. Musk has named leftist groups Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise & Resist, Indivisible Project and Democratic Socialists of America as being involved in the protests. Musk also pointed out that ActBlue is currently under investigation for allowing illegal and foreign contributions to election campaigns, and that large donors to ActBlue include George Soros, Reid Hoffman, Herbert Sandler, Patricia Bauman, and Leah Hunt-Hendrix.

Other than the timing, there is no indication at the time of this writing that the Tesla protests and attack on X are connected.