Elon Musk speaking at TED2017. Image: Marla Aufmuth/TED Conference/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
However, staff at the platform told news outlets that there is a high chance Musk was lying about the attack.
An online conversation between Elon Musk and Donald Trump on X (formerly Twitter) faced technical difficulties last night (12 August) after people were kept waiting more than 40 minutes before the livestream kicked off.
Trump, a former US president and the Republican presidential candidate for this year’s elections, was scheduled to have a chat with Musk on X Spaces at 8pm ET last night. However, nearly 20 minutes after the conversation was supposed to begin, Musk claimed the platform was victim to a “massive DDOS attack” and that he was working on “shutting it down”.
A DDoS, or Denial-of-Service, attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with high volumes of data from multiple sources. There are a few ways to do this, but a common method employed by attackers is to use multiple compromised computer systems to direct the attack traffic.
“Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” Musk wrote on X at 8.18pm ET. Meanwhile, there are no reports of any disruptions to the rest of the platform.
A source at the company told The Verge that the disruption wasn’t caused by a DDoS attack. Another source told the outlet that there was a “99pc” chance Musk was lying about it.
“As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what president Trump has to say,” Musk said once the interview started. Before that, multiple outlets report that people were kept waiting to the sound of elevator music.
Trump is the Republican presidential candidate for the US elections in November. He will face Democratic candidate and current US vice-president Kamala Harris in a debate on ABC in September.
X faced legal action from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) last week, after the platform started defaulting users into allowing their posts, interactions and even conversations to be used to train its AI chatbot Grok, pitched as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The decision by X meant that those who did not consent to their data being used to train Grok would have to manually turn it off, raising the eyebrows of data experts and EU regulators. Days later, the DPC said X decided to suspend the processing of personal data of EU users to train Grok.
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Elon Musk speaking at TED2017. Image: Marla Aufmuth/TED Conference via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
