Trump and Musk’s Live Stream on X Crashes

Elon Musk’s highly anticipated live interview with former President Donald Trump on X Spaces faced significant technical challenges, leading to a delayed start and widespread frustration among users.

The event, scheduled to begin at 5 PM PT on Monday, was intended to mark Trump’s return to X after a nearly three-year absence. However, when users attempted to join the Space at the scheduled time, they were met with an error message stating, “This Space is not available.”

The conversation, which Musk referred to as a “conversation,” eventually began at 5:42 PM PT, a full 42 minutes late. This delay echoed previous technical difficulties experienced by X, notably during Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s 2023 presidential campaign announcement, which also suffered from repeated crashes and delays.

Musk Links Delay to Alleged DDOS Attack

Musk attributed the disruption to a “massive DDOS attack on X,” claiming that the platform had conducted extensive testing earlier in the day with 8 million concurrent listeners. Despite these preparations, the event faced immediate issues, with the stream repeatedly crashing and being inaccessible to many users. As the delay continued, terms like “Crashed,” “unable,” and “Twitter blackout” began trending on X.

Those who managed to access the Space were initially greeted with approximately 30 minutes of lo-fi techno music playing from Trump’s account, followed by several minutes of silence.

When the interview finally began, Musk linked the alleged DDOS attack, which refers to a distributed denial-of-service attack where a server is overwhelmed by a flood of artificial traffic, to opposition against Trump’s message. “As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” Musk stated.

Did a DDOS Attack Really Happen?

While Musk insisted that the platform’s data lines were overwhelmed by hundreds of gigabits of data, a source within X confirmed to The Verge that there was no such attack. Another X employee estimated a “99 percent” likelihood that Musk’s claim was false, raising doubts about the veracity of the explanation.

The interview’s delay also highlighted Trump’s return to X, where he posted for the first time since January 2021 after being banned from the platform. His Monday posts included promotions for the interview with Musk and campaign ads, marking a significant moment in his social media presence, which had primarily been centered on his own platform, Truth Social, since his ban. Musk reinstated Trump’s X account in November 2022, shortly after acquiring the company.