Elon Musk guaranteed entertainment. Instead, he delivered technical difficulties.
Musk had planned to host Republican candidate Donald Trump for an interview “Live on X,” formerly Twitter Spaces, at 8 p.m. But for the second time during the 2024 presidential election, the social media site was glitching, with many users apparently unable to listen to the interview.
Musk posted that “there appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Work is underway to stop it,” adding that he may continue the interview with a smaller group of listeners. DDOS stands for “distributed denial of service.”
The interview started about 45 minutes late.
The flurry of reports of technical issues was reminiscent of Musk’s previous X Live event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who launched his Republican presidential campaign with an X Live interview with Musk. As appeared to be the case with Trump’s event, the site’s audio-only livestream portal crashed.
“I assume all the Trump supporters who ridiculed DeSantis for crashing his Twitter Space with Musk will do the same here. LOLOLOLOL,” conservative commentator Erick Erickson wrote, adding a clown face emoji.
Musk said ahead of the event with Trump that he would be “doing some system scale testing tonight and tomorrow.” But those precautions 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's still background music playing.”
Many other users were unable to get in at all, either being presented with a greyed out web page where the portal would normally appear, or a message stating that the portal was not available on the mobile app.
Trump's campaign spokesman claimed the Republican candidate and Musk were “breaking the internet.”
Musk’s interview with Trump was set to be the third in a series of interviews with 2024 presidential candidates that have interested the tech mogul this year. But Musk has now pledged to throw his full support — and X feed real estate — behind Trump’s third campaign. The billionaire has the potential to boost Trump’s re-election chances by contributing from his personal fortune and mobilizing his dedicated online following.
