Musk’s Trump interview disrupted as X hit with “DDoS attack”

Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), claims a massive DDoS attack against the social media platform was responsible for disrupting his highly anticipated interview with former US President Donald Trump.

The interview, which was to be broadcast using X’s Spaces feature, was delayed by over 40 minutes due to technical difficulties, leaving thousands of users complaining they could not access the stream.

Users attempting to access Trump’s live-streamed interview, who remains the Republican presidential candidate for the upcoming election, were met with a message saying, “Unable to fetch Space.”

In response to the issues, Musk took to X to announce that his team was actively working to “shut down” what he described as a DDoS attack.

The delay and Musk’s claim of a DDoS attack left some of his followers pointing fingers at the Democratic Party, the FBI, and even the CIA as potential culprits.

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

Though no evidence has been presented to support these theories, Musk himself appeared to further fuel the speculation.

After a 40-minute delay, the Spaces feature went live again, and according to figures shared by Musk, more than 16.4 million people had listened to the conversation within the first 12 hours.

Musk revealed that prior to the live interview, X had successfully tested its Spaces feature with over 8 million concurrent listeners.

This isn’t the first time X has encountered technical problems during a political event.

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his bid to run against Trump for the Republican Presidential nomination in May 2023, he agreed to publicly launch his campaign using the platform.

However, the first 30 minutes of the broadcast were plagued with poor audio feedback, unclear speech, and dropped connections, leading to a significant drop in audience numbers during the broadcast — from 600,000 to 100,000.

Musk has previously expressed his support for Trump in the upcoming presidential election on November 5th, in which Trump is expected to face Vice President Kamala Harris.