Global Outage Hits X: Musk Calls Cyberattack Unprecedented in Scale
Social media platform X (formerly Twitter) faced an unprecedented series of technical outages on March 10, leaving millions of users unable to access the service. According to company CEO Elon Musk, the disruption was caused by a large-scale DDoS attack that leveraged significant computing power.
The first outage occurred early in the morning GMT, affecting feed loading, mobile app functionality, and the web version. Data from Netblocks.org indicated that peak complaints exceeded 40,000, with the most severe issues reported in North America and Europe. After partial restoration of the platform, two additional waves of attacks followed, causing repeated service disruptions.
Experts believe the attack was designed to overload X's servers by generating a massive volume of fake requests — a classic Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) scenario. Such attacks can typically be mitigated with sufficient infrastructure, but Musk noted that the scale and coordination of this attack exceeded typical hacker operations.
The hacker group Dark Storm Team, known for targeting organizations involved in international conflicts, has claimed responsibility for the incident. However, cybersecurity experts caution that identifying the true orchestrators is difficult due to the use of fake IP addresses and advanced obfuscation techniques.
Despite the three waves of attacks, X’s engineers managed to stabilize the platform by the evening of March 10. The built-in chatbot Grok, which answers user questions, is now reporting no further access issues. Nevertheless, the incident underscores the need to strengthen the defenses of critical social media infrastructure against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
The X outage stands as one of the largest of 2025, highlighting the vulnerability of even major tech giants to complex network attacks. While the company has not disclosed the specific measures taken, sources indicate that security system upgrades are already underway to prevent similar incidents in the future.
