The much-anticipated interview between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on August 12, 2024 faced significant technical glitches. The Musk-Trump interview on the social media platform X became a point of discussion after Musk attributed the glitches to a DDoS attack.
Less than 20 minutes into the highly-hyped interview, Musk announced that a large distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack had targeted the social media platform. A DDoS attack attempts to cripple a platform by overwhelming it with too many queries in a short period, most of which are meaningless, intending to cause system overload and eventual failure.
“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,” Musk posted on X on Monday. He later confirmed that the interview would proceed with a reduced audience and promised an unedited audio version would be available shortly. Downdetector, a site that monitors technical issues and outages, recorded a spike in complaints about X, with most reports pointing to the X app and website as the source of the disruptions.
After the interview, Trump posted a recording of the Spaces event, although it was not immediately playable. This marked his return to X, despite previously stating he wouldn’t rejoin the platform, even after Musk had invited him to do so earlier. As Musk characterized the disruptions as an “attack,” conspiracy theories quickly spread on X. Some users accused Democrats or Trump’s critics of orchestrating the attack to sabotage the interview. However, Musk has yet to provide a verified explanation for the outage or release any incident reports or logs.
Despite these unverified claims, over 15 million people accessed the playback of the event, according to the details of the recording shared by Trump on X, indicating the massive interest in the conversation.
This isn’t the first time that an event on X has been disrupted by technical issues. In May 2023, a Twitter Spaces event featuring Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was delayed and plagued by glitches, which Musk attributed to “straining” servers. When Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, he undertook significant restructuring, including firing essential teams and experts responsible for maintaining the platform.
Many users have blamed this move for the platform’s history of outages, while Musk has pointed to the old platform’s infrastructure, describing its code stack as “brittle.” USA Today reported that the rare public conversation between Trump and Musk, which spanned more than two hours and was overwhelmingly friendly, revealed little new about Trump’s plans for a second term. The former President spent much of the discussion focused on his recent assassination attempt, illegal immigration, and his plans to cut government regulations.
“If I had not turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now — as much as I like you,” Trump told Elon Musk. The aftermath of the Musk-Trump interview sheds light on the challenges faced by social media platforms in handling high-profile events and the ongoing battle against cyber threats like DDoS attacks. Hopefully, this incident will prompt further discussion on improving platform security and resilience in the face of such disruptions.