On Monday, Elon Musk’s X faced several outages. While this could be a DoS attack, Musk speculates the involvement of several large entities.
On Monday, X faced multiple outages for users across the globe. According to DownDetector, over 39,021 users in the US alone reported being restricted from the platform, whereas the platform was down for over 2000 users.
Cybersecurity specialists attribute this kind of outage as ‘denial of service (DoS),’ which is mostly carried out by an individual or a small group. It works by sending an overwhelming amount of rogue traffic to the targeted websites, working as a roadblock.
The main aim of DoS attacks is to overwhelm, but it could expose specific vulnerabilities that might be exploited by hackers.
Such attacks can cause significant disruptions for users, resulting in frustration and loss of communication. Moreover, denial-of-service attacks are complicated to track, and even the IP addresses offer little to no insight into who could be.
How can this be seamlessly mitigated? Through regular traffic filtering, limiting the number of requests, using scalable cloud infrastructure, and early detection, among others.
Overall, nearly 40,000 users reported the downtime at 10 am ET, with certain issues persisting for 20,000 users even around 2 pm ET.
Meanwhile, X’s owner, Elon Musk, asserts that the primary reason was a “massive cyberattack” by a large and coordinated group.