The much-awaited conversation between former U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk went awry recently.
A conversation between billionaire Elon Musk and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was scheduled to take place at the former’s social media platform X. However, the interview of them together went into a disarray due to technical glitches, and Musk later claimed that the glitch was part of a DDoS attack.
The conversation, which was considered to be an important event, was expected to revolve around Trump’s return to X after being banned from Twitter in 2021. Not to miss, Musk has been endorsing Trump as a U.S. presidential candidate, instead of the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Now with the conversation planned between him and Trump, Musk was expecting to garner a lot of public attention.
Within 20 minutes into the highly-awaited interview, Musk talked about a large distributed denial-of-service attack on X. For those caught unaware, DDoS is an attack against a platform with an aim to bring it down by overloading it with too many queries in a very short span of time. While most of these queries are useless, it attempts to direct massive traffic to the platform and lead to its eventual fall.
“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,” Musk posted on X on August 13 at 5:48 am IST.
Combined views of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump and subsequent discussion by other accounts now ~1 billion https://t.co/s8x8QmdmnY
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
However, he soon confirmed that an unedited audio version of the same would be made available. “We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today,” he further shared on X.
Meanwhile, Downdetector too saw a spike in complaints for X regarding the technical glitches and outages.
As for Trump, at 5:17 am IST, he shared a recording of the Spaces event, which sort of marked his return to X. He had earlier said that he would not rejoin, even though Musk had invited him to do so.
According to Musk, he termed the outage and technical glitches an “attack,” and soon after, conspiracy theories spread on X. While several users blamed Democrats or Trump’s critics for attacking X, there is no exact reason for the outage.
Nonetheless, this is not the first time that X has been disrupted by technical issues. Earlier, during a Twitter Spaces event with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in May 2023, the platform saw major glitches. Twitter was acquired by Musk in 2022, and he later renamed it as X.
