Elon Musk said Donald Trump interview suffered a 'DDoS attack' — X / Twitter employees say he's lying (2024)

Over 54 minutes of elevator music and then – complete silence.

That's what X users who tried to tune into Elon Musk's interview of Donald Trump were treated to on Monday night as X's live audio platform, Spaces, glitched out when hundreds of thousands of user accounts tried to listen in.

Musk blamed the issue on a denial-of-service attack (DDoS) attack. However, some X employees say that's not true.

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X's Spaces failure

The interview between Musk and former president Donald Trump was heavily promoted in advance by both participants.

Earlier this summer, Musk officially endorsed Trump in his reelection campaign for president. Trump has been struggling in the polls since President Joe Biden announced he wasn't running for reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. To promote the interview, Trump returned to Musk's X before the Spaces chat and published a barrage of posts on the platform for the first time in nearly a year.

Trump's X account shared the Spaces chat around 15 minutes before its scheduled 8 p.m. ET start. While both Trump and Musk were in the Space, it took just over 54 minutes past the planned start time before the two started their conversation.

During that time, X users were reporting issues even entering the Space on X. Mashable viewed a few hundred thousand users in the Space around 8:30 p.m. When Mashable tried to enter the Space, we were abruptly pushed to a screen that said "This Space is not available." Other X users reported similar experiences and were unable to enter the Space to listen in. Those lucky enough to get inside were subject to elevator-esque waiting music, and then eventually, complete silence.

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When X's tech issues were finally resolved, Musk blamed a "massive DDoS attack" for the glitches.

"There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏," Musk posted. "Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later."

However, aside from the glitches in the Trump and Musk Space, the rest of X seemed to be running as normal at the time. Further raising doubts about Musk's DDoS claim, some X employees told The Verge that what Musk said about an attack simply was not true.

"A source at the company confirmed to The Verge that there wasn’t actually a denial-of-service attack," the tech outlet reported. "Another X staffer said there was a '99 percent' chance Musk was lying about an attack."

X previously faced technical difficulties when Musk tried to host a Spaces stream last year with then-presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. The platform, then-known as Twitter, crashed in a similar fashion as hundreds of thousands of users attempted to enter the Space.

Musk's fake numbers and "Twitter" flub

Once the Space chat was up and running at the 54 minute mark, the two had a typical right-wing political discussion talking about many of the topics that Musk posts about on social media and Trump brings up in his stump speeches.

Trump congratulated Musk for the tech issues, attributing them to "breaking every record" of viewership, citing inaccurate stats. Later on in the interview, Trump appeared to be looking at the views on his post that shared the Space, which was at around 60 million views at the time. Post views on X function more like impressions, tracking each instance a post appears in front of a user, whether they actively clicked on it — or it just appeared on their feed as they scrolled.

The live audio Space itself between Trump and Musk peaked at around 1.4 million concurrent viewers.

Musk has leaned into Trump's inaccurate viewership references though.

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"Combined views of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump and subsequent discussion by other accounts now ~1 billion," Musk said on X, calculating the total of all post views or impressions about the Space chat.

As of publishing time, the X Space between Trump and Musk has roughly 24 million views, which includes the live viewership numbers as well as replays. The post itself, however, claims 183 million views or impressions.

Interestingly, when talking about the platform that he acquired and rebranded as X, Musk referred to it as "Twitter" numerous times during his conversation with Trump. He also called "posts" by their no longer official name, "tweets."

As for Trump, his @realDonaldTrump account pinned the Space to the top of his X profile. Trump's account hasn't posted to X since.

As of Tuesday, Trump is back on his social media platform, Truth Social. Trump shared links to his conversation with Musk on Truth Social – but he didn't share a link to X. Instead, he pointed Truth Social users to recordings of it on YouTube and the right-wing video platform Rumble.