Elon Musk insists “massive” DDOS attack delayed Trump interview

According to Elon Musk, a “massive”DDOS attack caused disruption to the start of his livestream interview with Donald Trump on X.

On August 12, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and owner of X/Twitter, arranged an interview with Donald Trump, the 2024 Presidential Candidate for the Republican party.

Despite this, the interview faced several crashes before it could go live on Spaces, causing many X users to have to wait until the full recording was released online at a later time.

Elon Musk stated that, although they had successfully tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier that day, a “massive DDOS attack on X”was currently hindering the progress of the interview.

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 proceeded with the live stream at 8.30 ET PM, but with a reduced number of simultaneous listeners.

According to Engadget, many listeners encountered thirty minutes of hold music and then several minutes of complete silence when attempting to join the live stream with Donald Trump.

The stream finally began, but 10 minutes later than the revised proposed time. Musk expressed regret for the delay, stating that a supposed DDOS attack had caused a backlog of work and resulted in hundreds of gigabytes of data being saturated.

During the discussion with Trump, Musk did not disclose the source of the DDOS attack. He also did not explain on X/Twitter afterwards why the Spaces feature was affected by the attack instead of the entire site.

DDOS attacks can manifest in various forms, but at its core, it is an effort to disrupt the flow of traffic on a specific server.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack is intentionally carried out to overload the targeted server, rendering its information and services inaccessible to regular traffic.

Despite the prepared livestream with Donald Trump, there were no reports of mass disruption to X/Twitter.

Musk argued that the DDOS attack serves as evidence of the strong opposition towards people simply listening to what President Trump has to say.