Elon Musk Blames DDoS Attack on X for Interrupting Interview with Trump
You were not the only one. If you tried to listen to the interview between Elon Musk and Donald Trump on the social media platform X, which was scheduled to start at 8 p.m. ET, nobody really could listen to it. And now we know why.
Musk tweeted about the interruption at 8:18 p.m., blaming a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
“What the hell, I’m still hearing about this at 8:18 PM. Sorry, it’s just a DDoS attack. The interview was supposed to start at 8 p.m., but it’s being delayed,” Musk tweeted.
### What is a DDoS attack?
It is worth noting, of course, that a DDoS attack works by overloading servers with too many requests, something that is indistinguishable from receiving many visitors to a website at once. And given the interest in both Musk and Trump as big fascist personalities, there is obviously widespread interest in this little chat they had planned. Interestingly, The Verge reported that a source at X told the news outlet that there was actually no DDoS attack. That anonymous source is quoted as saying there was a “99% probability” that “Elon was lying” about the attack.
Musk added that X had stress tested the system “with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.” Assuming Musk is telling the truth and his system can handle 8 million listeners, it is entirely plausible that more than 8 million people tried to listen to Trump and Musk spew their racist nonsense. The world has 8 billion people, and Twitter reportedly has around 500 million users worldwide.
“We will proceed with the lowest number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 p.m. ET and then release the unedited audio immediately after,” Musk wrote in a tweet. Finally, the interview started around 8:40 p.m. ET.
This is not the first time Musk has had trouble starting an interview on X’s audio platform Spaces. Something very similar happened when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis tried to make a big announcement that he was running for president.
It seems that cryptocurrency scammers have been taking advantage of Musk’s technical difficulties, including a prominent video on YouTube that currently uses a video of the billionaire. The video has hundreds of thousands of viewers at the time of writing this. Do not click on any links in that video, as they only lead to scams.
