Three separate outages appeared to hit Elon Musk’s X social media site Monday as he claimed it was suffering a ‘massive cyberattack.’ <\/p>\n
Downdetector.com first registered thousands of reports of trouble accessing or using the site around 5:30 a.m. ET. It took about an hour before those issues subsided.<\/p>\n
Then, around 9:30 a.m., the issues appeared to flare up again, with as many as 40,000 outage reports detected. It again took about an hour for that incident to dissipate. <\/p>\n
Finally, around 11:10 a.m., the issues cropped up again, according to Downdetector. <\/p>\n
A representative for X couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.<\/p>\n
Musk said Monday afternoon on X that there had been a ‘massive cyberattack’ against the site. <\/p>\n
‘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,\u201d he said. He didn\u2019t post any evidence of a cyberattack.<\/p>\n
Experts said the outage was consistent with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, a rudimentary but sometimes effective hacker tactic to overwhelm a website with traffic, effectively knocking it offline.<\/p>\n
Isik Mater, the director of research at NetBlocks, a company that tracks global internet connectivity, told NBC News that X had suffered intermittent outages since Monday morning. While establishing a DDoS attack with certainty can be difficult, Mater said, Musk\u2019s claim was plausible.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s difficult to be certain, but given the pattern of three observed outages, a denial [of] service attack targeting X\u2019s infrastructure can\u2019t be ruled out,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s certainly one of the longest X\/Twitter outages in our records.\u201d<\/p>\n
Musk said in an interview Monday afternoon on Fox Business that the outage was due to \u201ca massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area,\u201d a reference to internet protocol addresses. IP addresses, strings of numbers assigned to all internet-connected devices, include codes indicating their countries of origin.<\/p>\n
Large DDoS attacks usually rely on large armies of hacked devices from around the world. The IP addresses of the devices used against X aren\u2019t public, and they are unlikely to be a reliable indication of where the attacker was based.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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