Elon Musk’s much-awaited interview with former President Donald Trump was marred by technical glitches on Monday, with people unable to join the audio conversation on X’s Spaces platform.
Eighteen minutes into an interview that was supposed to start at 8 p.m. EDT., Musk posted on X that the platform was experiencing a “massive” denial-of-service attack (DDOS), which is a federal criminal act that involves flooding a site with data to overwhelm it and knock it offline.
Outage tracker Downdetector reported a spike in reports of X being inaccessible to users starting before the interview but it could not be immediately verified whether this was due to a malicious attack. The rest of X appeared to be operating normally, and X users questioned whether there was a DDOS attack or if the Spaces event was just overwhelmed with people trying to listen in.
At 8:42 p.m., the interview finally began.
X has suffered a host of technical issues since Musk took over the company. He has fired, laid off or driven out most of its staff — including engineers tasked with keeping the site running.
Trump had previously mocked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis when his primary campaign launched with a May 2023 interview on X that was marred by glitches.
“Wow! The DeSantis TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!” Trump wrote on May, 2023, on his Truth Social network. “His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”
The DeSantis event started with technical problems that Musk said were due to straining servers because so many people were trying to listen in. More than 20 minutes passed beyond the scheduled start time with users getting kicked off, hearing microphone feedback and hold music and dealing with other technical problems.
DeSantis dropped out of the race after a disappointing finish in Iowa’s kickoff caucuses.
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