Trump-Musk livestream on X hit by massive DDoS attack

WASHINGTON: Elon Musk has announced that a massive DDoS attack hit his livestream with former US President Donald Trump, forcing X owner to scale down the live audience. The interview was delayed as the glitch kept the users out of the livestream.

“Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later”, Musk wrote in a post on X.

Notably, the users on social media platform X faced numerous issues while looking for access to the livestream conversation of Elon Musk with Trump on the platform Monday night.

Within minutes of the event’s expected 8 pm ET start time, “crashed”, “unable” and “#TwitterBlackout” were trending on the site, reported CNN. A pop-up stating “this space is not available” with a monkey emoji appeared on the screen of desktop users as well who attempted to attend the ‘Spaces’ event.

Whereas, several others who tried to connect via the mobile app were met with a motionless, greyed-out screen and were unable to participate in the event. The disaster was akin to the technological difficulties X had encountered previously when Musk tried to conduct broadcast events featuring several other bigwigs.

Bugs and audio problems marred last year’s ‘Spaces’ event, which introduced Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ brief presidential bid. Musk attributed the problems to an overloaded server, according to CNN.

When Musk was getting ready for the meeting with Trump, he seemed to be cognizant of the possibility of technical issues. In order to make sure X’s systems were ready, the billionaire stated on Sunday night that he was doing ‘streaming tests’.

The Republican presidential nominee was recently interviewed at his Mar-a-Lago residence by live streamer Adin Ross. Trump noted that the interview with Ross helped the streaming platform ‘Kick’ break its viewing record.

Last month, Musk, who owns the social media platform X, endorsed Trump’s candidacy after the former president was injured in an attempted assassination in Pennsylvania. This endorsement marked a departure from the usual self-declared neutrality maintained by social media platform leaders, as reported by The New York Times.

Following the January 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill, Trump’s account was permanently suspended by Twitter (now X) under its previous ownership. However, under Musk’s ownership, the account was reinstated.

Trump’s planned talk with Musk comes after Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. (ANI)