You’re not alone. No one was actually able to hear the interview between Elon Musk and Donald Trump that was supposed to start at 8pm on social media platform X. And now we know why.
Musk tweeted about the outage at 8:18 p.m., claiming it was caused by a distributed denial of service attack.
“Apparently there was a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. We are working to shut it down. In worst case scenario we will reduce the number of live listeners and post the conversation at a later date,” Musk tweeted.
It appears that 𝕏 is experiencing a large scale DDOS attack and we are working to shut it down.
In the worst case scenario, we will reduce the number of live listeners and post the conversation at a later date.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
Of course, it’s important to note that DDOS attacks work by flooding a server with excessive requests, which is indistinguishable from a large number of simultaneous visitors to a particular website. And given that Musk and Trump are both big-time fascists, there’s clearly been widespread interest in this little chat they were planning. Interestingly, The Verge reports that a source at X told the news outlet that there was no actual DDOS attack. The anonymous source reportedly said there was a “99%” chance that “Elon is lying” about the attack.
Musk added that the X has been tested. Musk said that Twitter’s system went live with “8 million concurrent listeners early today.” Assuming that Musk is right when he says that his system can accommodate 8 million listeners, it’s entirely possible that over 8 million people will be trying to listen to Trump and Musk’s trashy racist drivel. There are 8 billion people in the world, and Twitter reportedly has around 500 million users worldwide.
“We’ll start with a smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30pm ET and post the unedited audio shortly thereafter,” Musk said in a follow-up. The interview ended up starting around 8:40pm ET.
This isn’t the first time Musk has had trouble broadcasting an interview on X’s Spaces audio platform: A very similar thing happened when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis tried to make a splashy announcement that he was running for president in May 2023.
Apparently, crypto scammers are taking advantage of Musk’s technical failings, such as the currently popular deepfake video of the billionaire on YouTube, which has hundreds of thousands of viewers at the time of writing. Do not click on any links in the video, as they will only lead to scams.
