Elon Musk’s X saw technical difficulties Monday as the billionaire attempted to host a live conversation with former president and 2024 Republican Party nominee Donald Trump through the platform’s spaces feature, which was significantly delayed due to system glitches.
The conversation between the pair was scheduled for 8 p.m. ET and a link to the talk was posted to the platform ahead of time; however, the gateway was faulty as the platform is seemingly unable to handle the demand.
Just over 15 minutes after the live stream was supposed to begin, Musk wrote, “There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down.”
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.
Soon after, the social media platform owner posted that the conversation would continue with a “smaller number of concurrent listeners,” beginning at 8:30 p.m. ET — the “worst case,” Musk wrote. The plan, he said, was to upload and post the unedited audio of the conversation “immediately thereafter.”
We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter https://t.co/oxF8PsNHnZ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
On Sunday, Musk said that he would be conducting “system scaling tests,” in order to assess the ability of the platform to carry a high-demand conversation with the former president. The event additionally saw the Trump campaign tweeting from the former president’s previously banned personal account in promotion of the talk.
At pub time, the conversation appeared to be underway with a more limited audience, eventually climbing to 1.1 million.
“My apologies for the late start. We unfortunately had a massive distributed knowledge of service attack against our servers,” Musk said at the start of the talk. “We think we’ve overcome most of that, and so it’s now time to proceed. But this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.”
Monday’s mishap was not the first time a highly publicized livestream on Spaces was met with a stutter and a crash. In May 2023, former Republican presidential contender and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his 2024 bid for the ticket on X with half a million viewers — and a similarly troubled start.
Later revitalizing that stream, Musk acknowledged the technical delays at the top of the hour, noting that having him as host was what stalled DeSantis’ announcement due to the high volume of listeners. Still, he argued that the ability for politicians to reach their audience without a media middle man was “profound” and that he aligned with DeSantis in his fight to protect the freedom of speech.
The Kamala Harris campaign’s official Truth Social account, meanwhile, trolled both Trump and Musk for previous statements made by both men about the other.
In one case, they “ReTruthed” on Truth Social Trump’s post about the DeSantis debacle on his X livestream, writing, “His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”
The campaign, under the handle @KamalaHQ, then quote-tweeted Musk criticizing Trump’s age when he said 82 would be “too old to be chief executive of anything, let along the United States of America.”
“Interesting,” they wrote.
Interesting pic.twitter.com/z8UnPRt85a
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 12, 2024
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