Elon Musk recently blamed a delay in an interview with former President Donald Trump on an attack on X, citing a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack that overwhelmed X’s servers with bogus traffic. Musk acknowledged that there were also mistakes made by X’s staff that contributed to the snafu preventing people from joining the stream. Despite the issues, Musk praised the X team for their efforts in fending off the attacks and fixing the mistakes, ultimately leading to a successful interview with Trump.
This incident brought back memories of a similar technical glitch during a streaming interview with Musk on X, where the audio cut in and out and the interview had to be restarted, causing a significant delay. Comparisons were drawn to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ presidential bid announcement in May 2023, which also faced technical difficulties during a streaming interview with Musk on X. Trump had criticized DeSantis’ technical issues on X as a “disaster,” echoing concerns over the platform’s stability and reliability.
X had been facing various glitches and outages following Musk’s takeover as CEO, which coincided with a significant number of layoffs at the company. Despite Musk appointing a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, he remains actively involved in overseeing the technical aspects of the platform. In an effort to prevent similar issues in the future, Musk stated that X had stress-tested its systems and confirmed they could handle up to 8 million concurrent streams. However, when users attempted to access the Trump interview, they encountered technical difficulties and were unable to join.
DDOS attacks are commonly used to overwhelm servers by flooding them with traffic, often conducted by massive botnets. To protect against such attacks, companies typically employ third-party services to identify and block fake traffic and increase bandwidth. It remains unclear what specific measures X had in place to defend against DDOS attacks or if they utilized any external services for protection. Musk previously claimed to have moved away from a cybersecurity company following a global tech outage caused by CrowdStrike, but it’s uncertain if their services would have prevented such an attack on X.
While specific details about the mistakes made by X staffers were not disclosed, Musk expressed confusion over how a DDOS attack would have targeted a specific stream without affecting the rest of the platform. Despite the challenges, the interview with Trump eventually commenced, with both X and Musk declaring it a success. X reported 73 million “views” for the audio stream, although the term “views” was not explicitly defined. The incident highlighted the importance of cybersecurity and technical preparedness for companies, especially in high-profile events like interviews with prominent figures such as former President Trump.
