Who Are The 'Dark Storm Team'? All About The Group Behind Cyberattack On Elon Musk’s X

Elon Musk-owned social media platform X, previously known as Twitter, experienced three major outages in a single day. After multiple attacks, hacking group “Dark Storm Team" allegedly took responsibility for a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on the platform, according to a post on Telegram. The disruptions, which started early on Monday, had its impacts even till Tuesday morning.

While taking responsibility, the group said they are “taking Twitter offline."

After several users reported disruptions, Elon Musk in a post on X, said: “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."

This is not the first time that X has been down. Last year, there were several instances when the the social media site went down. However, the impact this time has lasted long.

Who Are The ‘Dark Storm Team’

Dark Storm Team, a hacking collective founded in 2023, is known for its sophisticated cyber warfare tactics and successful breaches of high-security systems.

According to Orange Cyberdefense, the group operates with a pro-Palestinian agenda and has recently vowed to launch cyberattacks against government websites of NATO countries, Israel, and nations supporting Israel.

On Monday, the group claimed responsibility for a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on social media platform X, formerly Twitter. In a Telegram post, they stated they had successfully “taken Twitter offline" and shared a screenshot of a real-time connectivity status page displaying failed connection attempts from multiple locations worldwide.

The X Disruptions

X faced intermittent outages, according to Downdetector, restricting 39,021 users in the U.S. from accessing the platform at its peak at 10 a.m. ET. By 5 p.m., there were reports of the service being down for roughly 1,500 users.

A source in the internet infrastructure industry said X had been hit by several waves of denial of service beginning around 9:45 UTC. The source spoke on the condition of anonymity as the person was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Denial of service works by overwhelming targeted websites with rogue traffic. Such attacks are not necessarily sophisticated but they can cause significant disruption.