Elon Musk’s social media platform X went down three separate times with the longest outage lasting several hours, leaving people on Bluesky to make merry.
Hacking group called Dark Storm Team claimed it was responsible, in now-deleted Telegram posts.
“Twitter has been taken offline by Dark Storm Team,” a post read on the group’s account, with a screenshot showing connection problems in a long list of countries.
Musk linked the cyber attack to IP addresses “in the Ukraine area”, but this has been disputed.
A post from an X account, allegedly connected to the Dark Storm Team read: “According to what Elon Musk said about the cyber attack on the X platform, its source is Ukraine.
“It is an accusation without any evidence, and we have no relationship with Ukraine.”
Garbage
However, Ciaran Martin, professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government told the BBC that explanation was “wholly unconvincing” and “pretty much garbage.”
Prof Martin believes X was targeted by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, where hackers flood a server with internet traffic to prevent users from connecting to a website.
“It’s not that sophisticated – it’s a very old technique,” Mr Martin told Radio 4’s Today programme.
“I can’t think of a company of the size and standing internationally of X that’s fallen over to a DDoS attack for a very long time,” Martin added.
He said the incident at X “doesn’t reflect well on their cyber security.”
Bluesky
Bluesky, a new platform similar to X, users were quick to dig out X and Musk.
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Tesla
It comes US President Donald Trump has said he will “buy a brand new Tesla” after shares in the electric car firm fell more than 15%.
Donald Trump blamed “radical left lunatics” boycotting the firm to “attack and do harm” to Tesla owner Elon Musk.
