Elon Musk guaranteed entertainment. He delivered technical difficulties instead.
Musk planned to host GOP nominee Donald Trump for an interview “Live on X,” formerly Twitter Spaces, at 8 p.m. But for the second time in the 2024 presidential election, the social media site was down and many users were apparently unable to listen to the interview.
Musk posted it “it appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down,” adding that he may continue the interview with a smaller set of listeners. DDOS stands for “distributed denial of service.”
The interview started about 45 minutes late.
The swirl of posts about technical difficulties echoed Musk’s previous X Live event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who launched his Republican presidential campaign on an X Live interview with Musk. As appeared to happen with Trump’s event, the site’s audio-only livestream portal crashed.
“I guess all the Trump supporters who ridiculed DeSantis for his Twitter Space crash with Musk will do the same here. LOLOLOLOL,” wrote conservative commentator Erick Ericksonwith an emoji on the clown’s face.
Musk wrote before the event with Trump that he “will be doing some system scaling tests tonight and tomorrow beforehand.” But these precautions could not save the platform from crashing.
Some X users were able to enter the live stream portal, but as Bloomberg’s Stephanie Lai wrote“We’ve gone ten minutes and the background music is still playing.”
Many other users were unable to log in at all, receiving either a grayed out web page where the portal usually appears or an unavailable notification in the mobile app.
Trump’s campaign spokesperson claimed that the GOP nominee and Musk were “break the internet.”
Musk’s interview with Trump was meant to be the third in a series of 2024 presidential candidates that have interested the tech mogul this year. But Musk has now pledged to throw his full support – and X feed properties – behind Trump’s third campaign. The multi-billionaire has the potential to boost Trump’s re-election chances with contributions from his personal fortune and mobilize his devoted online followers.