'A country is involved:' Elon Musk says X suffered massive cyberattack; 'Dark Storm' claims responsibility

US billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform X on Monday (March 10) faced a massive outage for the third time in a day, with thousands of users reporting issues globally.

Downdetector website showed that the first disruption occurred at around 3:30 pm IST (10:00 am GMT). The second spike was observed at around 7:00 pm IST (1:30 pm GMT). The latest outage was reported at 8:44 pm IST (3:14 pm GMT), with more than 34,500 users reporting issues in accessing the app in the US alone on Downdetector.

The outage was recorded in the US, India, Australia and the UK among other nations.

Downdetector showed that while 56 per cent of the reporters faced problems logging into the app, 33 per cent encountered issues on the website.

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Dark Storm claims responsbility

Meanwhile, according to media reports, Hacking group Dark Storm Team has claimed responsibility for a Distributed Denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the platform.

Dark Storm Team, a hacking collective known for its sophisticated cyber warfare tactics, has gained attention for breaching highly secure systems.

Founded in 2023, the group reportedly follows a pro-Palestinian agenda, according to Orange Cyberdefense.

Last month, Dark Storm Team announced plans to carry out cyberattacks against government websites of NATO countries, Israel, and other nations backing Israel.

Musk blames massive cyberattack

In a post on X, Musk blamed a ‘massive cyberattack’ by a ‘very large group’ or country for the outages.

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“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,” Musk wrote.

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 … https://t.co/aZSO1a92no

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 10, 2025

Musk was responding to another user’s post hinting at the potential attack on X, who attempted to connect the dots between criticism mounted against the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and recent attacks targeting Tesla stores in the US.

“First, protests against DOGE. Then, Tesla stores were attacked. Now, X is down. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that this downtime is the result of an attack on X,” the user suggested.

Users left frustrated

Frequent outages caused frustration among users.

While some areas are experiencing partial restoration, many users still cannot access the platform.

X previously suffered major outages in 2023 when the app experienced a slew of glitches for over an hour as links stopped working.

Elon Musk took over formerly Twitter in 2022 and renamed it to X, changed ‘tweets’ to ‘posts’ and got rid of the bird logo.

The US billionaire also carried out mass firings at the company, relieving nearly 80 per cent of the staff.