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X is experiencing a wave of outages today due to a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack from the Dark Storm hacking group.
Before the group claimed responsibility in a Telegram post, X owner Elon Musk described the event as an unusually large attack by a resource-rich group. "There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X," he said on 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."
Dark Storm is a "pro-Palestinian hacktivist group primarily known for targeting Israel and its allies," according to cybersecurity vendor SOCRadar. The group also collaborates with pro-Russian hackers to expand their operations. The Telegram post shows Cyrillic letters at the top.
The first reports of service disruptions began around 5 a.m. ET. X recovered before going down again around 9 a.m. Service has been in and out since then, according to Downdetector.
As shown in Dark Storm's Telegram post, the outage appears to be global. We checked the Downdetector pages for South Africa, Germany, France, the UK, Japan, the UAE, and Brazil. All show a similar graph of user-reported issues, with only slight variations.
The last time Musk acknowledged a DDoS attack on X was in August ahead of an X Spaces live stream with Donald Trump, which eventually started 40 minutes late.
Musk is now working for the Trump administration as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has prompted protests and vandalism at his other companies, Tesla and SpaceX.
(Disclosure: Downdetector owner Ookla is owned by PCMag parent company Ziff Davis.)