Elon Musk has claimed that his social media platform X (previously Twitter) got here beneath a “massive cyberattack” on Monday, leaving it inaccessible for a number of hours.
Talking on the positioning as soon as it was again on-line, the billionaire urged the assault could have been orchestrated by a “large, coordinated group and/or a country,” and later indicated it might need originated from Ukraine.
Hundreds of X customers reported issues accessing the platform for a lot of Monday, with the outage showing most pronounced between 9.30am and 6pm, as tracked by monitoring website Downdetector. Musk advised Fox Enterprise that “we’re not sure exactly what happened,” however mentioned the dimensions of the assault implied a major expenditure of assets.
A hacking group generally known as Darkish Storm claimed accountability on the Telegram messaging app, although their assertion is as but unverified. The group sometimes targets Israeli websites and promotes cryptocurrency and hacking instruments.
X underwent comparable outages shortly after Mr Musk accomplished his takeover in 2022, when the entrepreneur minimize a lot of the workforce and made broad modifications to its IT programs. Since shopping for Twitter for $44 billion (£34 billion), Musk has laid off round 80 per cent of the corporate’s workers.
The alleged assault comes amid rising protests towards Mr Musk’s involvement in Donald Trump’s administration, the place he leads the brand new Division of Authorities Effectivity (Doge). Tesla premises have suffered vandalism, with demonstrations happening at dealerships. Musk has beforehand urged he could face assassination makes an attempt due to his authorities position. When an X consumer posited that hackers needed to “silence” Musk and the platform, the billionaire tersely responded: “Yes.”
Individually, shares in Tesla, Musk’s electrical automobile firm, fell on Monday in response to wider market sell-off, sparked by fears of a US financial downturn.
