Musk says X suffering from ‘massive DDOS attack’
Elon Musk says X is suffering from “a massive DDOS attack” that he implies has delayed the broadcast of his interview with Donald Trump on the platform:
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
DDOS stands for distributed denial of service and occurs when a site is flooded with traffic in an effort to make it inaccessible.
Key events
Musk says ‘massive attack’ illustrates opposition to Trump
Continuing on, Elon Musk drew a link between the cyber-attack that he says X suffered and opposition to Donald Trump’s candidacy.
“As this … massive attack illustrates there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what president Trump has to say, and so but I’m honored to have this conversation,” Musk said.
As for why he sought out the interview, Musk said: “It’s really intended to just get a feel for what Donald Trump is just like in a conversation … it’s hard to catch a vibe about someone if you just don’t hear them talk in a normal way.”
Musk says X has ‘overcome’ cyber-attack, interview will proceed
After a delay of more than 40 minutes, Elon Musk is now speaking, and says X has overcome a cyber-attack and that his interview with Donald Trump will now take place.
“My apologies for the late start. We unfortunately had a massive, distributed denial of service attack against our servers and saturated … all of our data lines, like basically hundreds of gigabits of data were saturated,” Musk said.
“We think we’ve overcome most of that, and so it’s now time to proceed.”
The hold music has now stopped and been replaced by … nothing.
There are more than 135,000 people in the Space where Donald Trump and Elon Musk are supposed to be having an interview, but it is now completely silent and X indicates both men have their microphones muted.
Here’s the latest from Musk on how this interview is going to get back on track:
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
Meanwhile, the Guardian’s US politics live blog has managed to get into the Space where the interview is being held, but hears only some Muzakesque hold tunes.
Needless to say, Democrats are pleased with this turn of events.
Here’s a spokesperson for Kamala Harris’s campaign:
Helen Sullivan
Hi there, this is another resident Guardian live blogger, Helen Sullivan. I appear to have been let into the space, and am currently hearing spacey elevator holding music.
A lot of people are replying to the Spaces link on Trump’s page saying they hear the same or can’t get in.
So far, I haven’t seen anyone saying that it has started, so that seems to be what everyone who is in is hearing.
The number of people in the space dropped by about 7,000 over the course of the last few minutes, to around 193,000 – unclear if this was because of technical issues or people giving up on waiting.
Elon Musk went on to say that he tested X earlier today and it worked just fine:
Musk says X suffering from ‘massive DDOS attack’
Elon Musk says X is suffering from “a massive DDOS attack” that he implies has delayed the broadcast of his interview with Donald Trump on the platform:
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
DDOS stands for distributed denial of service and occurs when a site is flooded with traffic in an effort to make it inaccessible.
Just minutes ago, the Trump campaign described his talk with Elon Musk as “the biggest interview in history”:
This is the biggest interview in history, and now, we’re asking YOU to make this President Trump’s BIGGEST FUNDRAISING DAY EVER!
Before the interview is over, we’re calling on TEN MILLION Patriots to donate ANY AMOUNT and proudly say, I STAND WITH TRUMP!https://t.co/28o6G0j1Zm
— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 12, 2024
Tis a bummer that no one seem to be able to hear it.
Perhaps wary of a repeat of the debacle that marred the launch of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, Elon Musk yesterday said he would be getting X’s systems ready for his interview with Donald Trump:
Whatever he did does not seem to have worked, since we still are not able to listen in to Musk and Trump’s conversation.