Elon Musk says ‘massive DDOS attack’ delayed his live broadcast with Donald Trump

X’s live streaming infrastructure seems to have failed, too, during the company’s senior year. X owner Elon Musk was scheduled to interview Donald Trump live on Spaces, starting at 8pm ET on Monday. But the stream crashed frequently and was completely inaccessible to many users.

Musk it is said that the failure was due to a “massive DDOS [distributed denial of service] X attack,” and that the company “tested the program with 8 million simultaneous listeners earlier today.” Instead, only a “small number” of people will be able to listen to the live chat. As of 8:30pm ET, the live stream was scheduled to begin. “Crash,” “unable” and “Twitter deletion” are trending on the platform.

Those who were able to join the stream were greeted with about half an hour of soothing music followed by a few minutes of complete silence. The live stream finally started at 8:40pm ET. “All of our data lines, like hundreds of gigabits of data, were full,” Musk said. “We think we’ve overcome a lot of that.” Musk did not explain how a DDOS attack could target only one aspect of the service without affecting other aspects of the X app or website.

It is not the first time that high-profile live broadcasts in space have encountered technical problems. Last year, Ron DeSantis tried to announce his interim presidential bid during a live interview with Musk on X, but that broadcast was delayed after repeated crashes. Musk, at the time, said Twitter’s servers were “like melting down.” Musk’s biographer later reported that the problems were the result of months of instability within Twitter’s systems after Musk ordered his cousins ​​to immediately dismantle one of the company’s data centers.