Elon Musk guaranteed entertainment. He delivered technical difficulties instead.
Musk planned to host GOP nominee Donald Trump for an interview “Live on X,” formerly Twitter Spaces,” at 8 p.m. But for the second time in the 2024 presidential election, the social media site was glitchy and many users apparently couldn’t listen to the interview.
Musk posted that “there appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down,” adding that he may proceed with the interview with a smaller set of listeners. DDOS stands for “distributed denial of service.”
The interview started about 45 minutes late.
The swirl of posts about technical difficulties echoed Musk’s previous X Live event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who launched his Republican presidential primary campaign on an X live interview with Musk. As appeared to happen with Trump’s event, the site’s livestream portal, which is audio only, crashed.
“I’m assuming all the Trump supporters who ridiculed DeSantis for the crashing of his Twitter Space with Musk will do the same here. LOLOLOLOL,” wrote conservative commentator Erick Erickson, with a clown face emoji.
Musk posted ahead of the event with Trump that he was “going to do some system scaling tests tonight & tomorrow in advance.” But these precautionary measures couldn’t save the platform from crashing.
Some X users were able to enter the livestream portal, but as Bloomberg’s Stephanie Lai posted, “We’re ten minutes in and there is still background music playing.”
Many other users couldn’t enter at all, getting either a gray-toned webpage where the portal would usually pop up or an unavailable notification on the mobile app.
Trump’s campaign spokesperson claimed that the GOP nominee and Musk were “breaking the internet.”
Musk’s interview with Trump was supposed to be the third in a series with 2024 presidential candidates who have interested the tech mogul this year. But Musk has now pledged to put his full support — and X feed real estate — behind Trump’s third campaign. The multibillionaire has the potential to boost Trump’s reelection chances with contributions from his personal fortune and mobilizing his devoted online followers.
