“Musk and Trump Interview: How a DDOS Attack Disrupted X Platform”

Elon Musk attributed a 42-minute delay in his interview with former President Donald Trump to a combination of a cyberattack and internal errors at X, his social media platform. Musk elaborated that a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack, which inundated X’s servers with fake traffic, played a significant role in the disruption.

“Considering the importance of this event, a DDOS attack was almost inevitable,” Musk noted on his social media platform early Tuesday. He also acknowledged, “We made some unforced errors, but kudos to the X team for managing the attacks and resolving our mistakes! Everything worked out in the end.”

This incident evoked memories of the problematic launch of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign in May 2023. That announcement, also hosted by Musk on X, suffered from audio issues during the initial minutes, resulting in a half-hour delay after restarting the stream.

On Truth Social, Trump labeled DeSantis’ technical woes on X as a “disaster,” a sentiment that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign shared amidst the issues on Monday night.

At that time, X was grappling with a series of glitches and outages, possibly linked to the extensive layoffs that followed Musk’s acquisition and his role as CEO. Although Linda Yaccarino has since taken over as CEO, Musk continues to oversee the platform’s technical operations.

In an effort to avoid a repeat of past mishaps, Musk stated that X had thoroughly tested its systems, confirming their capability to support up to 8 million concurrent streams. Despite these preparations, users attempting to access the Trump interview at the scheduled 8 p.m. ET start time were met with blank screens, unable to join the stream.

DDOS attacks typically involve large botnets generating immense traffic to cripple platforms or websites. Companies often employ third-party services to filter out fake traffic and enhance bandwidth to mitigate these attacks. It remains unclear whether X utilizes such services. Following a global tech outage last month linked to CrowdStrike, Musk claimed that X had severed ties with the cybersecurity firm, though it’s uncertain if their services would have prevented this incident.

Musk did not detail the nature of the errors made by X staff or how the DDOS attack could specifically disrupt a single stream without affecting the entire platform, which continued to function during the interview debacle.

Ultimately, the interview proceeded, and both X and Musk hailed it as a triumph. According to the company, the audio stream garnered 73 million “views,” though the definition of this metric was not clarified.