By Matthew Becerra, March 25, 2025
Social media platform X recently experienced a series of outages all lasting roughly an hour, drawing concerns over cybersecurity and transparency in big social media companies from Cal Poly Pomona students and experts.
CEO Elon Musk claimed in an X post that the cyberattack was carried out by either a well-organized group or another country.
This would be a nation-state adversary engaging in advanced persistent threat (APT) activities such as cyber espionage, infrastructure infiltration, and data theft, using sophisticated methods to maintain prolonged access to networks and steal sensitive information like the 2017 NotPetya attack attributed to Russia.
However, cybersecurity experts, like Cal Poly Pomona alumnus K Singh, who has a degree in computer information systems, doubt this.
Singh said major cyber threats from countries like Russia, North Korea and China are usually stealthier compared to large-scale disruptions to social media platforms.
“Typically, nation-states operate in a ‘low and slow’ manner, staying under the radar,” Singh said, “They don’t launch full-scale attacks on social media platforms. It doesn’t align with their usual motives.”
Singh said the outage was too short to be the work of a nation-state, adding if a government had been responsible, X wouldn’t have recovered as quickly as it did.
Singh pointed out that no major cybersecurity organizations have reported any evidence supporting Musk’s claim.
NBC News reported that several experts linked the outage to a distributed denial of service attack, a tactic where hackers overload a website with traffic to take it offline, with outages lasting an hour.
As cybersecurity concerns grow, students at CPP shared their thoughts on social media security and personal data protection.
Jorge Franco, an electromechanical systems engineering technology student, said he protects himself by staying anonymous and avoiding sharing personal information online.
Chemical engineering student Joshua Romero said social media platforms should be more transparent about cybersecurity threats.
“I don’t think social media platforms do enough to protect against cybersecurity threats,” Romero said. “There’s always stuff getting leaked out all the time, so I feel like they could use more security.”
Feature image by Connor Lālea Hampton
