X outages: Pro-Palestinian Dark Storm takes credit, while Musk blames ‘Ukrainian forces’

Billionaire Elon Musk blamed Ukrainian forces for the repeated global outages that social media platform X experienced on Monday (March 10), even as a pro-Palestinian hacking group called Dark Storm claimed responsibility for the cyberattack.

“We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukrainian area,” he told Fox News in an interview.

Earlier, the owner of X and Tesla had posted on X that though the social media platform is attacked daily by hackers, Monday’s attack was massive and was done “with a lot of resources”, which Musk said indicated the involvement of a big group or a country.

“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X. 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…”

Repeated outages

On Monday, X users experienced frequent outages. Downdetector, a website that monitors online services, reported complaints about the outages from thousands of X users in India, the US, and the United Kingdom.

Also Read: Was your X account down on Monday? Musk blames it on ‘massive cyberattack’

Downdetector reported a peak of almost 40,000 users that were affected in the US by 10 am ET, which fell to below 2,000 around 5 pm. One source told Reuters that there were multiple denial-of-service attacks from morning.

Dark Storm claims credit

Dark Storm, a pro-Palestinian hacker group, claimed responsibility for the outages on X in a post on the Telegram channel.

Dark Storm has in the past attacked nations and entities that support Israel’s bombing of Gaza after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas.

Musk and Ukraine

Elon Musk has criticised Ukraine’s war efforts against Russia, and apparently supports US President Donald Trump’s view that Ukraine should go along with American efforts to broker peace with Russia.

X users have attacked Elon Musk for criticising Ukraine President Zelenskyy instead of targeting Russian President Putin. But Musk has defended himself, saying he literally challenged Putin to one-on-one combat over the Ukraine war, and that his Starlink satellite system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army.

Also Read: Anti-DOGE protesters in US target Musk where it will hurt — Tesla

“Their entire frontline would collapse if I turned it off. What I am sickened by is the years of slaughter in a stalemate that Ukraine will inevitably lose,” said Musk.

Relations between Ukraine and the US have taken a turn for the worse after the highly-publicised war of words in the Oval Office on February 28 between Zelenskyy on one side and Trump and Vance on the other.