On Tuesday morning, a hacker group known as Anonymous Sudan brought X, formerly known as Twitter, offline in over a dozen nations in an attempt to pressure Elon Musk into introducing his Starlink service in their country.
X was unavailable for more than two hours, affecting thousands of customers.
“Help us get our message to Elon Musk: ‘Open Starlink in Sudan,'” the hackers wrote on Telegram.
The latest victim of the gang’s hacking to “benefit Sudan and Islam” is X.
The BBC spoke to the hackers about their methods and motivations over several weeks of secret discussions on the communication app Telegram.
Crush, a member of the gang, told the BBC that Tuesday’s attack overwhelmed X’s servers with massive volumes of traffic, forcing it offline – the same crude and very primitive hacking techniques for which the gang is known.
According to the outage-tracking website Downdetector, approximately 20,000 outage reports were reported by users in the United States and the United Kingdom, with a much larger number of people likely affected.
Another hacking group member, Hofa, stated that the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack was intended to raise awareness to Sudan’s civil war, which is “making the internet very bad and it goes down quite frequently for us.”
X has not publicly acknowledged the disruption, and Mr. Musk has not reacted to inquiries about the launch of his satellite internet service in Sudan.
