Trump and Musk fireside chat crashes X, possible DDoS attack
Elon Musk and Donald Trump – two billionaires who love to hear themselves talk – were supposed up hook up on social media Monday night for a three-hour riveting chat. But instead, as fate would have it, the platform crashed, with Musk stating his beloved X was suffering from a cyberattack.
Image by X.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump – two billionaires who love to hear themselves talk – were supposed to hook up on social media Monday night for a three-hour riveting chat. But instead, as fate would have it, the platform crashed, with Musk stating his beloved X was suffering from a cyberattack.
The two accomplished money magnets, known for their polarizing gift for gab, were scheduled to begin the live stream on Musk’s X Spaces at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time on the @realDonaldTrump's X account.
Users tried to tune in, expecting to hear the two talk about everything from Big Tech to the upcoming US presidential race to handling AI advancements and election misinformation, but to no avail.
By 8:07 p.m. ET, the Spaces live stream was showing 8.4 million views, with many X users reporting they could not get into the chat space. Within a half hour, that number jumped to over 17.5 million.
Then at 8:19 p.m., a frustrated Musk finally addressed the issues claiming it was a malicious distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which floods a site with traffic so it crashes – not the millions trying to load the Space stream.
“There appears to be a massive DDoS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down,” Musk announced to millions of confused X users at at 8:19 p.m.
“Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later, “ Musk posted, without any more information.
There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down.
undefined Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.
To Note, Cybernews did check the social media accounts of the usual suspects on Telegram to see if any of the larger hacktivist groups had claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack on X, but did not see any messages that would have us think it was anything other than too many users trying to join in at once.
Last May, Musk had similar issues with X crashing repeatedly for users (including Musk) trying to tune into the live stream campaign launch of Republican Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis, also on Spaces.
To avoid the same scenario, Musk had ran a successful test of the Spaces live stream on Sunday, advertising the event in a following post that simply stated, "Entertainment guaranteed!"
Stream Test 2 https://t.co/flDYGbv1HI
undefined Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2024
Musk, who organized and promoted the conversation on his social media platform X (formally known as Twitter), has been rumored to be a friend of The Donald.
In May, Trump commented that if he wins the presidency come November he would seriously consider tapping Musk to become a policy adviser in Oval Office.
Trump, had not posted on his X account since he was banned from then-Twitter in January 2021 following the January 6th riots on Capitol Hill.
Musk reinstated Trump’s account in November 2022 after a public vote, but until today Trump has been silent on the platform.
The Republican presidential nominee – known to handle his own social media accounts – made about eight separate posts Monday in the lead-up to the chat, some political fodder and others to advertise the event.
"IT WILL BE THE INTERVIEW OF THE CENTURY!" Trump posted on his X account early Monday morning in all caps.
The post, which he followed up with his signature "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN," showed 5.6 million views by Monday evening.
At about 8:30 p.m. the talk was up and running. Click here to read our recap of the live stream.