Musk blames ‘massive cyber attack’ for series of outages on X

AUSTIN, Texas – Mr Elon Musk blamed widespread disruptions on his social media platform X on a “massive cyber attack”, which he claimed was orchestrated by a “large, coordinated group” or country.

Tens of thousands of users globally

reported intermittent outages

on X on March 10, according to the monitoring website Downdetector. New posts were failing to load for users in countries including the US, Britain, France and India at various points throughout the day. The service disruptions lasted a few minutes each.

Mr Musk later acknowledged that the platform had experienced a site-wide disruption. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” he wrote in a post on X. 

Dark Storm, a pro-Palestinian “hacktivist” group, took credit for the attack via its Telegram page, but has not provided proof that it was behind the disruptions. A representative for Dark Storm told Bloomberg News that the attack was part of a wider hacktivist effort against Israel. 

A spokesperson for X did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

This is not the first time Mr Musk has cited a cyber attack for disruptions on his social media platform.

In 2024, Mr Musk similarly blamed a “massive” cyber attack for

the delay of a conversation

between himself and then Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on X.

At that time, he described the attack, without evidence, as a distributed denial-of-service, or DDOS, attack. A DDOS attack involves hackers flooding a site with more internet traffic than it can handle to overload its servers and other operations. BLOOMBERG