Elon Musk has claimed that a “massive” DDOS attack on X disrupted the start of his livestream interview with Donald Trump.
Telsa CEO and X/Twitter owner Elon Musk organized an interview with the 2024 Presidential Candidate for the Republican party, Donald Trump, on August 12.
However, before the “conversation” could go live on Spaces, the interview faced multiple crashes, leaving many X users to wait until the full recording was available later online.
Elon Musk claimed that a “massive DDOS attack on X” was preventing the interview from going ahead, but that they “tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners” earlier that day.
There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
Despite the crashes, Musk went ahead with the stream to a “smaller number of concurrent listeners” at 8.30 ET PM.
However, according to Engadget, many of those listeners were met with half an hour’s worth of hold music before being met with total silence for several minutes when trying to join.
The stream properly began just 10 minutes after the revised proposed time. Musk apologized for the late start, explaining that the alleged DDOS attack had “saturated all of our deadlines” and that “hundreds of gigabytes of data” were saturated as a result of the attack.
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During the conversation with Trump, Musk didn’t share where the DDOS attack was coming from. Nor did he share on X/Twitter afterward why a DDOS attack would affect the Spaces feature, rather than the entire site.
DDOS attacks can come in many different forms, but essentially it’s an attempt to disrupt the traffic on a targeted server.
A DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attack deliberately overwhelms the targeted server, so normal traffic cannot access its information and services.
There were no reports of mass disruption to X/Twitter outside of the prepared livestream with Donald Trump.
Musk claimed that the DDOS attack “illustrates there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.”