A side-by-side image of Elon Musk and the logo of his social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Photo | courtesy.
X (formerly Twitter) users worldwide experienced significant disruptions accessing the platform on Monday as a result of a cyber attack. Reports of outages began surfacing around 1 p.m. East African Time, with a notable spike at 5 p.m. affecting over 40,000 users.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, addressed the situation, stating that the platform was targeted by a “massive cyberattack.” He suggested that the attack was executed with substantial resources, possibly implicating a large coordinated group or even a nation-state.
In August 2024, X faced a similar attack which led to a significant outage that affected approximately 66 per cent of its users.
The nature of the recent attack raises concerns comes weeks after Elon Musk claimed that some unnamed individuals were “gaming” X’s community notes meant for fact checking. Community notes replaced fact-checkers in the platform.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are believed to be the cause of today’s X outages. DDoS attacks overwhelm servers with excessive traffic, and have become more sophisticated.
Notably, the 2016 attack on DNS provider Dyn disrupted major websites like Twitter, Netflix, and PayPal, which means such attacks can be deadly given the sheer number of platforms it can affect.
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Moreover, groups like Anonymous Sudan have emerged, launching DDoS attacks on various global platforms. Their targets have included Microsoft, Netflix, and even X itself, aiming to pressure Elon Musk into providing Starlink services in Sudan. It was also alleged that Anonymous Sudan attacked Kenya’s digital infrastructure, paralyzing the government websites in July 2023.
The specific details about the perpetrators and their motive remain unknown.
