On 10 February 2025, social media platform X faced three consecutive outages attributed to a “massive cyberattack,” according to Elon Musk. The disruptions, which caused significant inconvenience to users, occurred at approximately 4:00 pm, 8:00 pm, and 9:40 pm IST, highlighting the vulnerabilities even for high-profile platforms.
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In a post addressing the incidents, Elon Musk stated, “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.” He emphasized the scale and coordination of the attack, suggesting it may have been executed by a well-resourced entity.
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Thousands of users reported issues accessing the platform during the outages, and cybersecurity experts believe the disruptions were consistent with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This type of attack floods a network with an overwhelming amount of traffic, rendering it temporarily inaccessible.
Jake Moore, Global Security Advisor at ESET, shed light on the nature of DDoS attacks, saying: “Cybercriminals attack from all angles and are incredibly fearless in their attempts. DDoS attacks are a clever way of targeting a company without having to hack into the mainframe and the perpetrators can remain largely anonymous. This makes it that much more difficult to protect from when the landscape is completely unknown apart from having generic DDoS protection. However, even with such protection, each year threat actors become better equipped and use even more IP addresses such as home IoT device to flood systems making it increasingly more difficult to protect from. X remains one of the most talked about platforms making it a typical target for hackers marking their own territory. All that can be done to future proof their networks is to continue to expect the unexpected and build even more robust DDoS protection layers.“
Andy Thompson, Senior Cyber Researcher, CyberArk Labs, said: “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. The problem is that these platforms are built for engagement, not resilience. Attackers know this and are treating them as digital battlegrounds, because taking a platform offline can be just as damaging as stealing data. Complicating matters further is the chaos of attribution we’re seeing play out. Cyberattacks today resemble crime scenes with multiple fingerprints, as hacktivist groups, cybercriminals and nation-states are all working in parallel or jockeying for credit. Claiming responsibility is easy but proving who’s behind it is far more difficult. And when multiple actors rush to take credit, one thing becomes clear: the real objective is disruption itself, not just the message.”
