![Former U.S. President Donald Trump, pictured on the left, and Elon Musk, pictured on the right [File]](https://th-i.thgim.com/public/incoming/ju3kcx/article68519723.ece/alternates/LANDSCAPE_1200/Election_2024_Trump_54850.jpg "Former U.S. President Donald Trump, pictured on the left, and Elon Musk, pictured on the right [File]")
A conversation between Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk on the latter’s social media platform X went awry due to technical glitches that Musk claimed were part of a DDoS attack.
The conversation was a key event, as it marked Trump’s high-profile return to X after being banned from Twitter in 2021, following the Capitol riots. Musk has also strongly endorsed Trump as a U.S. presidential candidate, so bringing the former president onto his platform for a conversation was a significant move that captured public attention.
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What happened during the interview?
Less than 20 minutes into the highly-anticipated interview, Musk posted that a large distributed denial-of-service attack had hit the social media platform. DDoS refers to an attack against a platform that attempts to bring it down by overloading it with too many queries in too short an interval. Many of the queries are useless, as the aim is to direct excessive traffic to the platform and cause it to eventually fail.
“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,” posted Musk on X on August 13 at 5:48 am IST.
He later confirmed this would be the case, and promised an unedited audio version would quickly be made available.
“We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today,” he added on X.
Downdetector, which compiles reports of technical glitches and outages, recorded a spike in complaints for X, with most complainants pointing to the X app and the website as the source of their issues.
A screenshot from Downdetector shows a rising number of technical complaints surrounding X | Photo Credit: Downdetector
At around 5:17 am IST, Trump posted a recording of the Spaces event, but it was not immediately playable. This seemed to mark his return to X, which he previously said he would not rejoin, even though Musk had invited him to do so earlier.
Who is behind the DDoS incident?
As Musk termed the outage and technical glitches an “attack,” conspiracy theories rapidly spread on X. Users blamed Democrats or Trump’s critics for shutting down the interview and attacking X. However, Musk is yet to share a verified reason for the outage, or make available any incident reports and logs.
Another possibility is that the Spaces event was not able to handle the number of users tuning in to catch the interview, despite Musk claiming that it was tested with millions of people.
However, over 15 million accessed the playback of the event, per the details of the recording shared by Trump on X. This indicates a huge volume of interest in the conversation.
The interview recording on X saw millions of people tuning in | Photo Credit: Elon Musk on X
Has such an outage happened before?
This is not the first time an event on X has been disrupted by technical issues. A Twitter Spaces event with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in May 2023 was delayed and also saw glitches, which Musk attributed to “straining” servers.
When Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, he set to firing essential teams and experts who had kept the old social media platform running. Many users blamed his move for the new platform’s history of outages. Musk in turn blamed Twitter and its code stack for being “brittle.”
