Social media giant X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced widespread outages on Monday, March 10, affecting tens of thousands of users around the world.
The disruption persisted throughout the day, and was attributed by the company to a ‘massive cyberattack’ targeting the platform’s servers with a DDos attack, one in which so much information is fed into the servers that they become overwhelmed, slow down, and can even break down. According to multiple reports, over 11,000 users were unable to access their accounts, post content, or send messages during via the platform during the attack, making this incident one of the biggest online threats the X/Twitter has ever faced.
Owner Elon Musk took to X to address the situation, stating, ‘In these moments, X is suffering a massive cyberattack. We’ve been receiving attacks daily, but today’s was with greater resources. It’s either a large, coordinated group and/or a country involved.’ His comments suggest a sophisticated operation aimed at crippling the platform, though he provided no specific evidence of the perpetrators. Efforts to trace the source of the attack are reportedly ongoing.
Data from Downdetector, an online service tracking website outages, substantiated the scale of the issue, with a peak of 26,579 user reports in the United States alone by mid-afternoon. By early evening in Europe, 10,700 American users remained locked out, with intermittent service interruptions reported globally.
According to Musk on X, these types of attacks are common, but never as powerful as this. Parallel to the issues on X, other businesses either owned or one in which he has interests, such as Tesla and Space X, were also attacked simultaneously, although Space X did not suffer any inconveniences.
Newsweek reported a hacking group known as Dark Storm Team claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack on X. The hackers formed as a pro-Palestinian collective in 2023 and have reportedly targeted government websites of NATO countries, Israel, and nations supporting Israel. However, Musk thinks it is more likely to have been a collective with far bigger resources.
While X has faced hacker attacks before, this incident stands out due to its alleged malicious intent. Reuters quoted Musk’s assertion that the attack’s intensity overwhelmed server capacity, disrupting normal operations.
As the platform works to restore full functionality, the event demonstrates the risks social networks face in an increasingly polarised world.
