Elon Musk's much-awaited interview with former President Donald Trump was marred by technical glitches on Monday, with people unable to join the audio conversation on X's Spaces platform. Eighteen minutes into a conversation that was supposed to start at 8 p.m.
EDT., Musk posted on X that the platform was experiencing a “massive” denial-of-service attack (DDOS), which is a federal criminal act that involves flooding a site with data to overwhelm it and knock it offline. Outage tracker Downdetector reported a spike in reports of X being inaccessible to users starting before the interview but it could not be immediately verified whether this was due to a malicious attack.
The rest of X appeared to be operating normally, and X users questioned whether there was a DDOS attack or if the Spaces event was just overwhelmed with people trying to listen in. Musk had been promoting the event earlier in the day, calling it a conversation rather than an interview. He said X “tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.
” At 8:42 p.m., the interview finally began.
By 9:20 p.m., more than 1.
2 million people were listening in. X has suffered a host of technical issues since Musk took over the company. He has fired, laid off or driven out most of its staff — including engineers tasked with keeping the site running.
Trump had previously mocked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis when his primary campaign launched with a May 2023 interview on X that was marred by glitches.