Image source: FILE X (Twitter)
Elon Musk’s microblogging platform X (formerly Twitter) is down for users around the world. According to the outage monitoring platform DownDetector, many users reported issues with X being down today, August 14. Users from different regions reported that the issue started around 12:45 PM and peaked around 1 PM.
Image source: FILEX Down
Many users encountered outages on the microblogging platform. When they tried to post, they were greeted with the message “We’ve run into a problem, but don’t worry, please try again.” The issue also affected websites, preventing users from viewing any posts. Around 70 people reported complaints related to issues within the website.
Image source: FILEX Down
X services are back online and apps and websites are working fine.
DDoS attack on X
A much-anticipated interview between former US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, scheduled to take place on social media platform X (owned by Musk) on August 13, was postponed due to technical issues. 18 minutes after the scheduled start time of 8pm US ET (5:30am IDT), Musk posted that X appeared to have been hit by a large DDoS attack. He added that he was working to resolve the issue and said that in the worst case scenario, the conversation would be posted at a later date with a reduced number of live listeners.
What is a DDoS attack?
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to overwhelm a targeted server, service, or network with a large amount of Internet traffic, disrupting normal traffic.
How does a DDoS attack work?
DDoS attacks are carried out using networks of internet-connected machines. These networks consist of devices, such as computers and IoT devices, that are infected with malware, allowing an attacker to control them remotely. These individual devices are called bots (or zombies), and a group of bots is called a botnet.
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