The long-awaited interview between Elon Musk and former President Donald Trump was hit by technical issues on Monday, with people unable to join the audio chat on X’s Spaces platform.
Eighteen minutes into the conversation, which was supposed to start at 8 p.m. ET, Musk posted on X that the platform was suffering from a “massive” distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, a federal criminal act that involves flooding a site with data to overwhelm it and take it offline.
Outage tracker Downdetector reported a spike in reports of users being unable to access X ahead of the interview, but could not immediately verify whether this was due to a malicious attack. The rest of X appeared to be working normally, and X users wondered if there was a DDOS attack or if the Spaces event was simply being flooded with people trying to listen in.
Musk had been promoting the event earlier in the day, describing it as a conversation rather than an interview. He said X “tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.”
At 8:42 p.m., the interview finally began. By 9:40 p.m., about 1.3 million people were listening. Trump congratulated Musk on “breaking every record in the book tonight” with the number of people trying to get in to listen.
X has suffered from a range of Technical problems Since Musk took over the company, he has fired, laid off or forced out most of its employees — including the engineers tasked with keeping the site running.
Trump had previously mocked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis when his primary campaign got underway with May 2023 Interview on X Which was full of errors.
“Wow! DeSantis launching his Twitter account is a disaster!” Trump wrote in May 2023 on his Truth Social social network. “His entire campaign will be a disaster. Watch!”
DeSantis’s event began with technical issues that Musk said were caused by servers being overwhelmed because so many people were trying to tune in. It went more than 20 minutes after the scheduled start time with users being kicked out, microphone feedback and music being played, and other technical issues being dealt with. The number of listeners listed was about 420,000.
DeSantis dropped out of the race after a disappointing showing in the Iowa caucuses.
Trump, who had been posting on his own social media site, Truth Social, returned to X on Monday morning, posting for the first time since being banned in 2021. The posts promoted his interview with Musk and included campaign ads.
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