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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has revealed that his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) suffered a major DDoS attack that interfered with a scheduled interview between himself and former US president Donald Trump.
The interview was scheduled for 10am AEST, but users attempting to access it were met with a “not available” message. According to media reports, approximately 214,000 users were able to connect. Other reports suggest the listens hit a peak of 1.3 concurrent listeners.
Following the reports of issues, Musk said that the broadcast of the interview would be limited to a “smaller number of live listeners” and that the full conversation would be posted on the platform afterwards.
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.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024========================
A number of users questioned the claims, confused as to why a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack only affected access to the interview rather than the entire site. However, IT firm Damovo’s Andrew Hay, speaking with the BBC, said that the DDoS could have targeted a specific part of X’s systems.
“I believe the DDoS attack was targeting the broadcast portion of X’s service, without significantly impacting core functionality for everyone else on the website,” he told the BBC.
Musk claims that X’s systems were tested with 8 million concurrent listeners prior to the interview to prevent crashes.
We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today https://t.co/ymqGBFEJX0
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
Additionally, Musk repeatedly referred to the interview as a conversation, adding that the meeting between the two was meant to be more authentic.
“My use of the word conversation is deliberate,” he said in a post on X.
“This is so that people understand how [Donald Trump] talks when it’s a conversation, rather than an interview.
“Nobody is quite themselves in an interview, so it’s hard to understand what they’re really like.”
According to a report by X user The Rabbit Hole, at the time of writing, the conversation between Musk and Trump has been heard by 16.4 million people.
Musk has also extended an invitation to Vice President and Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris to have a conversation on the platform.
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