A Hacktivist Group Made X Unusable for Much of Monday to Protest Elon Musk

These days, X (formerly Twitter) is a combination of the kinds of posts that always dominated the site and the much more hateful, misleading content that Elon Musk, who owns the platform, has decided to push there. Musk paid $44 billion to purchase Twitter back in 2022, and since then, it has slowly morphed into a much more right-leaning space.

On March 10, X was down for much of the day, and Musk eventually came forward to say that the reason for the outage was a coordinated attack by a hostile actor. The news that X had been hacked left many looking for a culprit. Here's what we know about who might be responsible.

Following the news of the hack, many naturally wondered whether Anonymous, the most prominent left-leaning hacktivist organization, was behind the attack. Another group has taken credit for the attack, though, which may mean that it wasn't Anonymous.

Dark Storm, a pro-Palestinian hacker group, has also taken credit for the attack, and reports suggest that they are posting about it in their Telegram channel.

Dark Storm is a group that is often hired out to hack various organizations, but the claim that they are responsible is in dispute.

For his part, Musk said that they were tracing the roots of the attack.

“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk posted. “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.”

“We’re not sure exactly what happened but there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system, with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area,” he added.

Of course, Musk is not exactly the most reliable purveyor of information, but his suggestion seems to be that the Ukrainian government could be behind the attack as a response to the United States's shifting posture toward the war in Ukraine.

Another post, which may or may not be from Anonymous, claims that the hacking group is actually the one responsible for the X outages. In a picture that's been trending across social media, the posters claiming to be Anonymous say that they hacked X in response to Musk and Trump's rule over the country. They describe Operation Dreadnought as a "fight against fascism," adding that the "American people are suffering" because Musk and Trump are "drunk on power."

X is already a fairly unprofitable venture for Musk, who bought the company for far more than it was worth. It has become a vehicle for Musk to distribute his message, though, so in that way any potential outage hurts his bottom line. As we continue to learn more about who might actually be responsible for this attack, what seems clear is that whoever did this wanted to go after Musk.

Between that and the precipitous decline in the Tesla stock price, it's safe to say that March 10 was a pretty bad day for the world's richest man.