X Suffers Outage For Fourth Time in Two Days After Musk Blamed DDoS Attackers

X (formerly Twitter) is down for the fourth time in two days, causing disruptions in services globally. Hours after Elon Musk blamed the downtime on a series of cyberattacks and claimed the company was working on bringing the services online, X is experiencing a downtime, according to Downdetector.

The outage reports began to spike at around 1:45 PM IST on Downdetector, crossing 300 reports within an hour. Users flagged issues in accessing their news feed, and their DMs, and trouble loading or playing videos on the social media platform. While the reports of trouble accessing the site did not increase, they did not drop either.

While Musk has not acknowledged the first outage on Tuesday and the fourth in a row, he on Monday claimed the platform was hit by a massive cyberattack, without providing evidence. He claimed that while X keeps facing such attacks, the one that caused it to become inaccessible for hours was done by “either a large, coordinated group and/or a country.” Later, the 'hacktivist' group Dark Storm claimed responsibility for the cyberattack. However, they have not provided evidence either.

Experts said a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks could have been responsible for bringing down X on Monday.

“This incident highlights a pivot we’re seeing in the motivation behind cyber threats: what used to be straightforward data theft and exfiltration has shifted to full-scale digital disruption. We’ve seen this play out in critical infrastructure sectors like energy, but social media platforms like X are now emerging as a new form of critical infrastructure and should be treated as such,” said Andy Thompson, Senior Cyber Researcher at CyberArk Labs.

"Coordinated attacks, whether by hacktivists or state-sponsored groups, are becoming alarmingly frequent," said Ankit Sharma, Senior Director and Head - Solutions Engineering at Cyble, a cybersecurity firm. “These incidents emphasise the need for social media platforms to bolster their threat detection and mitigation strategies.”

Read more: X Outage Explained: What Is A DDoS Attack That Caused Day-Long Downtime?