It’s not just you. If you were trying to listen to Elon Musk’s interview with Donald Trump on the social media platform X that was supposed to start at 8 p.m. ET, no one was able to actually listen. And now we know why.
Musk tweeted about the outage at 8:18 p.m., blaming a distributed denial-of-service attack.
“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 tweeted.
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
It should be noted, of course, that a DDOS attack works by overloading servers with too many requests, something that’s indistinguishable from getting a lot of visitors to a given website at once. And given the interest in both Musk and Trump as large fascist personalities, there’s obviously widespread interest in this little chat they had planned. Interestingly, the Verge reports a source at X told the news outlet there wasn’t actually a DDOS attack. That unnamed source is quoted as saying there was a “99%” chance that “Elon was lying” about an attack.
Musk added that X had tested the system “with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.” Assuming that Musk is telling the truth that his system could handle 8 million listeners, it’s entirely plausible that more than 8 million people might try to listen to Trump and Musk spout their inane, racist bullshit. The world has 8 billion people, and Twitter reportedly has about 500 million users worldwide.
“We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 p.m. ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter,” Musk wrote in a follow-up. Ultimately, the interview did finally start around 8:40 p.m. ET.
This isn’t the first time that Musk has struggled to get an interview up and running on X’s Spaces audio platform. Something very similar happened when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to make a big splashy announcement that he was running for president back in May 2023.
It appears that crypto scammers have been taking advantage of Musk’s technical failures, including one prominent video on YouTube that’s currently using a deepfake video of the billionaire. The video has hundreds of thousands of viewers at the time of this writing. Do not click on any links in that video as they only lead to scams.