Social Media Giant X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced a widespread suspension on Monday, March 10th, affecting tens of thousands of users around the world.
The confusion lasted all day, resulting from a “massive cyberattack” that targeted the platform’s servers in DDOS attacks. This provides a lot of information to the server, which can be overwhelming, slower, and even breakdowns. According to multiple reports, more than 11,000 users were unable to access their accounts, post content, or send messages through the platform during the attack, making the incident one of the biggest online threats X/Twitter has ever faced.
Owner Elon Musk said, “In these moments, X said he was suffering from a massive cyber attack and took him to X to deal with the situation. We are under attack every day, but today we had more resources. It’s either a large, coordinated group and/or a country involved. His comments suggest a sophisticated manipulation aimed at crippling the platform, but he did not provide concrete evidence of the perpetrator. Efforts to track the cause of the attack are reportedly ongoing.
Credit: x.com
Data from Downdetector, an outage of online service tracking websites, demonstrated the scale of the problem, with 26,579 user reports peaking in the US alone by mid-afternoon. By the European evening, intermittent service disruptions had been reported worldwide, with 10,700 American users still locked up.
According to X’s Musk, these types of attacks are common, but not as powerful. Alongside the X issue, other businesses that own or interested businesses such as Tesla or Space X were also attacked at the same time, but SpaceX did not suffer from inconvenience.
Newsweek reported that a hacking group known as the Dark Storm team has claimed responsibility for the DDOS attack on X. The hackers were formed as a pro-Palestinian group in 2023 and reportedly targeted the government websites of NATO countries, Israel and national governments supporting Israel. But I think Musk is likely a mass with much larger resources.
X has previously faced a hacker attack, but the incident stands out due to suspected malicious intent. Reuters cited Musk’s claim that the strength of the attack overwhelmed server capacity and disrupts normal operations.
As the platform works to restore full functionality, this event illustrates the risks faced by social networks in an increasingly biased world.
