Elon Musk’s much-anticipated interview with former President Donald Trump on X Spaces faced significant technical setbacks, delaying the event by more than 40 minutes.
Scheduled to begin at 8 PM ET on Monday, the interview immediately crashed. The conversation finally began at 8:40 PM ET, following a series of technical difficulties that disrupted the live event.
At 8:18 PM ET, Musk claimed that the delay was caused by a “massive DDOS attack” targeting X, making it impossible for the Space to proceed as planned. However, this claim was quickly disputed by sources within the company. One insider confirmed to The Verge that there was no denial-of-service attack, and another staffer suggested there was a “99 percent” chance Musk was not being truthful about the attack.
There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.
Despite Musk’s assertion that the system had been tested with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier in the day, the actual number of listeners at the time of the interview was approximately 915,000.
The technical issues experienced during the Musk-Trump interview are reminiscent of the problems that plagued Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s 2023 presidential announcement on X, which also suffered from server overloads and delays. Musk had previously attributed those difficulties to the platform’s inability to handle the high volume of users.
The recurring nature of these technical failures raises concerns about X’s capacity to manage large-scale live events under Musk’s leadership. As the platform continues to evolve, these incidents highlight the ongoing challenges X faces in maintaining reliability during high-profile events.
