Following outages reported across the UK and US on 10 March, Elon Musk, owner of X, has said that the social media platform suffered a cyber-attack.

Tens of thousands of users flocked to Downdetector to report outages which appeared to come in waves across the day, with most (58%) using the mobile app.

X owner Musk first took to the site to say that the platform suffered a massive cyber-attack, which “was done with a lot of resources.”

The Tesla owner then told Fox News, an American media outlet, that “There was a massive cyber-attack to try and bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”

These claims have yet to be substantiated, and even if true, attackers could have used compromised systems located in Ukraine in order to obsefucate their real location.

Cybersecurity researches have, however, found a different potential source for the attacks. Dark Storm, a hacktivist group that is allegedly affiliated with the Pro-Palestine movement, shared screenshots on their Telegram channel that they were conducting a distrubuted denial of service (DDoS) attack on X.

The screenshots were of Check-host.net, we website often used to prove a DDoS attack is taking place as it checks the availability of a website from different servers.

Dark Storm has previously taken credit for attacks against Europe, the US, and Israel. The group’s true affiliation remains unclear, as it could be a front for other more active cyber rings.

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Currently, it seems the DDoS attack has subsided, and X is not being protected by Cloudflare’s DDoS protection service, which employs a captach to suspicious IP addresses attempting to connect with the site.

DDoS attacks spiked 82% in 2024, driven by advancements in AI and IoT adoption.

In the case of X, Musk’s increased affiliation with the US president and his inflamed regards towards the Ukraine war, may have contrinbuted to the site being targeted.