Sudan-based hackers shut down X for hours, asks Musk for Starlink

LONDON: Elon Musk-run X (formerly Twitter) went down for hours for thousands of users after Sudan-based hackers hit the platform in a bid to put pressure on Musk into launching his cheaper internet Starlink service in their country.

The hacking group, called Anonymous Sudan, attacked X and took it offline in more than a dozen countries, reports the BBC.

X was down for more than two hours, with thousands of users affected.

"Make our message reach to Elon Musk: 'Open Starlink in Sudan'," the hackers posted on Telegram.

The website outage-tracking site Down Detector said nearly 20,000 outage reports were logged by users in the US and the UK.

X did not publicly acknowledge the disruption caused and Musk did not comment either.

The cyber-attack flooded X's servers with huge amounts of traffic to take it offline.

Hofa, a member of the hacking group, was quoted as saying that the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack was targeted at raising awareness about the war in Sudan which is "making the internet very bad and it goes down quite often for us".

Anonymous Sudan is linked with a Russian cyber-military unit. However, the group has denied its association with Russia.

The gang in June posted a message in support of the Russian government to end the mutiny led by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner paramilitary group.

The hacking group has earlier caused disruptions in France, Nigeria, Israel and the US.