Elon Musk Blames a "DDoS Attack" for Technical Issues in Donald Trump Interview on X Spaces
"There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down," Musk said.
Published Aug. 13 2024, 9:48 a.m. ET
In an interview that took place on X (formerly Twitter) Spaces on the evening of Aug. 12, Elon Musk and Donald Trump sat down for a virtual "conversation" — not an interview, as stressed by Musk — to talk, well, anything. "This is unscripted with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining," Musk tweeted before the call. However, their conversation was marred with technical issues that delayed the non-interview by almost an hour.
While some might just recognize that many viewers were tuning into the conversation, especially since Trump hasn't been on X in years and Musk himself has almost 200 million followers on the platform, the X CEO had another theory. Musk took to his tweets to immediately blame a "DDoS attack" for the technical glitches.
What does that mean?
What is a "DDoS attack" and why did Musk blame one for X Spaces crashing?
Though Trump tried to spin the failures into a positive by congratulating Musk on the high volume of listeners trying to tune in, Musk insisted that the issues were due to a DDoS attack.
"There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down," he posted. "Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later."
If you're not familiar, "DDoS" stands for distributed denial of service, and it's used to describe when a platform's servers are being intentionally flooded by users to cause it to crash. It's a type of cyber attack, one that has been used in the past to shut down certain websites.
However, per Reuters, there is no evidence to suggest that X Spaces was the subject of such an attack — and rather, it's likely that the website's servers were just overloaded by real supporters.
Some users pointed out that this isn't the first time X Spaces has suffered technical issues, like when Governor Ron Desantis kicked off his presidential campaign on the platform.
"Literally half the world wants to watch two stupid morons look like complete fools for entertainment purposes and this dummy thinks it's a DDoS attack," one person said.
"Why not just do a live stream instead of these consistently janky, broken Spaces?" another asked.
