Was a cyber attack really to blame for Musk-Trump interview tech issues? Expert isn’t buying it

Elon Musk has blamed a “massive” cyber attack for the 40-minute delay to hislive interview with former president Donald Trump on X Spaces on Monday night.

“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” the controversial tech billionaire posted on X, referring to a Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attack where an attacker floods a service with a large amount of internet traffic so that it stops working.

But experts have poured cold water on Musk’s claim that the social media platform came under attack.

Jake Moore, global cyber security advisor at cyber security company ESET, told The Independent that Musk’s version of events are “unbelievable” and “theatrical.”

Instead, he believes it is far more likely that the servers on Spaces simply couldn’t cope with the volume of people trying to join.

“I don’t think it was a DDoS in its true form. It’s usually committed by malicious threat actors – so cyber attackers. It’s not officially a cyber attack, it doesn’t actually steal any data, but it does knock a website offline. It’s very orchestrated by a group or individual,” he said.

“I think Musk may have been a bit too quick to react, a bit too theatrical in his terminology to create a storm on the platform.”

Moore explained that the tell-tale sign of a DDoS attack is when an entire platform suffers an outage, but last night users were still able to access X while being unable to view the feed on Spaces.

“We would’ve seen X dropped off entirely as a platform,” Moore said.

“We have seen this before. Usually on Meta with Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, sometimes all three go at the same time. To