A cyberattack hit X on Monday, causing users worldwide to experience an outage on the social media platform. Dark Storm Team, a group known for sophisticated cyber warfare attacks, has since claimed responsibility for the attack.

FIJ understands that this attack is ongoing as some users have also reported disruptions while using the platform on Tuesday. At press time, some X users in Nigeria had questions about pages failing to load on the app properly.

The cyberattack on X is a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, in which hackers flood servers with fake traffic, making the affected web pages unreachable. In the case of X, the mobile app was mostly unusable for users while the web version functioned intermittently.

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Mazi Nathan, a Nigerian product manager who had to switch to the web version of the app on Tuesday, wrote, “Twitter/X is down again. It seems yesterday’s DDoS cyberattack, allegedly originating from Ukraine, is continuing today. And for those wondering what a DDoS attack is — it’s when a platform is flooded with massive fake traffic, overwhelming its servers. This can make the app completely unusable on mobile, while the web version struggles but occasionally works due to different traffic handling. I just made this tweet via the desktop/web version.”

What Dark Storm Team Is Saying

Before Dark Storm Team took responsibility for the attack, Elon Musk, the owner of X, attributed the attack to IP addresses originating in Ukraine.

However, this contradicts the affiliations of Dark Storm Team, known as a pro-Palestinian group. On its Telegram channels, the group also said it had “no relationship with Ukraine”.

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In February, the group said it would “launch a cyber attack on the services and government websites of NATO countries, Israel and the countries that support Israel”.

Both on its X and Telegram accounts, Dark Storm Team has been reposting and sharing corresponding live updates of the disruptions on X in different countries.

During the outage on Tuesday afternoon, the group wrote on Telegram, “X app taken offline in a lot (of) countries in the world.” This was followed by a screenshot displaying the submitted problem reports regarding the outage.

Some other statements from the group include, “They are trying to do OSINT but they in honeybots”, and “Tesla’s over-inflated stock is crashing… Wouldn’t it be funny if it became a penny stock? Defund Billionaires!”

While the group has not released a statement on its motive for attacking X, there are indications that this could be a direct attack on Musk because of his work with the current US government.

Reports indicate that Dark Storm was first observed in 2023 and has targeted NATO countries, Israel and the US with large-scale DDoS campaigns and ransomware attacks.

The group’s earliest posts on X came in July, though the page joined Twitter in 2013. It offered to sell DDOS on websites to interested buyers.