As a high-profile conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk was about to begin, users of X, formerly Twitter, were greeted with the message: “This space is not available.”
Spaces, X’s live audio streaming feature, was the chosen forum for the dialogue, but it wasn’t working. Clicking on the link to the stream, hosted by Trump’s dormant @RealDonaldTrump account, froze the site and became unusable. Twitter users said they couldn’t connect; some said their browsers had stopped working.
Musk, who owns X, wrote: “It appears a massive DDOS attack is underway against X. We are working to shut it down.” The rest of X appeared to be functioning normally.
The interview was due to start at 8pm ET; Musk said he would fix the technical issues to start half an hour later. The issues appeared to be resolved in the meantime and users were able to join the stream by clicking on the link.
When X’s hold music finally stopped at 8:30 ET, a crackle could be heard from Trump’s microphone. Silence then fell over the livestream for another 10 minutes. Both the former president and Musk were muted. The interview began shortly after, with X eventually showing more than 1 million concurrent listeners.
Musk said: “The attack overwhelmed all of our data lines. We believe we have overcome most of that problem. As this massive attack illustrates, there is a lot of opposition to people simply listening to what President Trump has to say.”
Trump said he was happy with the mishap.
“You broke all the world records with so many millions of people. We consider it an honor,” he told Musk.
The day before the event, Musk said he would do “some system scaling tests” before the talk. On his wall, several of his tweets were labeled “streaming test.” However, an awkward silence descended on X when the interview was supposed to begin. A Washington Post reporter tweeted “So how did it go?” in response to Musk’s statement about stress testing.
The failure to publish the Trump interview is bad press for Musk’s X as a technological innovator and for the social network as a functional advertising vehicle. The company filed a lawsuit last week against some of its biggest advertisers in the world for taking their business elsewhere, alleging an illegal monopoly.
Trump’s arguments also occasionally put Musk in a difficult spot, for example when the former president persisted in his lies about climate change and Musk — the head of an electric carmaker — did little to correct him.
X has suffered similar glitches before. The problem with Trump’s interview mirrors the launch of Ron DeSantis’ ill-fated presidential campaign on the platform in May 2023. That conversation was also plagued by technical difficulties. The Florida governor was nearly inaudible at first amid loud feedback noise. X users said their apps crashed or logged out while they tried to listen. The stream repeatedly cut out and then started half an hour late with less than a tenth of the original listeners. Musk admitted the event had “broken Twitter’s system.”
The night of DeSantis’s botched launch, Trump posted on his X competitor, Truth Social: “Wow! DeSantis’ TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!” Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, which maintains its own Truth Social account, reposted Trump’s comments the night of the former president’s delayed conversation with Musk.
After Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and rebranded it X, he gutted the workforce, leaving just 20% of employees, with skeleton crews in key areas like site reliability. In November of that year, he reinstated Trump, who had been banned from Twitter after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Advertisers have fled amid a documented rise in hate speech on the social network. The billionaire has touted X as a vanguard leader in politics and free speech.