“Given the prominence of this conversation, there was of course a 100% probability of DDOS attacks,” the social media platform owner said, referring to a “Distributed Denial of Service,” an online site breakdown that occurs when fake users flood its server and block incoming traffic.
“We also had some unforced errors ourselves,” Musk wrote on X just after 3 a.m. in response to complaints.
“But good work by the X team fending off the attacks and fixing our mistakes! All’s well that ends well,” the eccentric billionaire entrepreneur said.
The widely anticipated Trump-Musk interview was scheduled to start at 8 p.m. Monday but was delayed by about 40 minutes after users could not access it.
Musk posted that there “appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X” and said the interview would go forth with less user access to it. He added that the interview would be posted in full online later.
The platform has experienced technical glitches with big-time interviews in the past, notably when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched his 2024 primary run on X.
In terms of Monday’s snafu, Musk said he had “tested the system” with 8 million concurrent users before the Trump interview.
When the interview began, he said, there was an “attack against our servers” that “saturated all of our data lines,” and “basically hundreds of gigabits of data were saturated.”
The interview eventually ran smoothly and lasted more than 2 hours, with more than a million people tuning in at once.
The pair spoke at length about foreign policy, securing the southern border, the assassination attempt on Trump and energy.
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