White House senior advisor Elon Musk said Monday that X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, is the target of a “massive cyberattack.”
Users reported intermittent outages of the social network Monday, according to a post on X by Musk. A hacker group known as the Dark Storm Team claimed responsibility for the attack, Newsweek reported.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk posted. “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 …”
Protests have taken place at Tesla dealerships over Musk’s support for President Donald Trump, according to Newsweek.
Musk told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow that the attack originated from IP addresses in the Ukraine area in a Monday afternoon interview.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump proposed establishing a committee led by Musk to review government operations and eliminate waste. Trump announced he would appoint Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy as co-chairs of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Nov. 12, before Ramaswamy stepped down to reportedly run for governor of Ohio Jan. 20.
The X outage was apparently caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, according to Newsweek. Cloudflare defines a DDoS attack as “a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.”
DDoS attacks use internet traffic requests, often from computers that have been infected with to flood the targeted system as a way to prevent normal requests from being processed, making web sites or email servers inaccessible. Multiple DDoS cyberattacks targeted Ukrainian systems prior to and at the start of Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
Musk closed the deal to purchase Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, seeking to create a “common digital town square” on the site, according to the Wall Street Journal.
This is a breaking news story. This article will be updated with more information as the situation develops.
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