Musk’s interview with Trump marred by technical glitches

Elon Musk’s much-awaited interview with former President Donald Trump was marred by technical glitches on Monday, with people unable to join the audio conversation on X’s Spaces platform.

Eighteen minutes into an interview that was supposed to start at 8 p.m. EDT., Musk posted on X that the platform was experiencing a “massive” denial-of-service attack (DDOS), which is a federal criminal act that involves flooding a site with data to overwhelm it and knock it offline.

Outage tracker Downdetector reported a spike in reports of X being inaccessible to users starting before the interview but it could not be immediately verified whether this was due to a malicious attack. The rest of X appeared to be operating normally, and X users questioned whether there was a DDOS attack or if the Spaces event was just overwhelmed with people trying to listen in.

At 8:42 p.m., the interview finally began.

X has suffered a host of technical issues since Musk took over the company. He has fired, laid off or driven out most of its staff — including engineers tasked with keeping the site running.

Trump had previously mocked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis when his primary campaign launched with a May 2023 interview on X that was marred by glitches.

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