Elon Musk’s XSpaces interview with Donald Trump was immediately derailed by technical issues for more than 40 minutes Monday night.
The interview was scheduled to begin at 8PM ET but did not get underway until 8:42. Musk blamed the delay on a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack.
“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down,” Musk wrote. “Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”
Musk doubled down in another post writing: “As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.”
However, an unnamed X staffer told The Verge that there was a “’99 percent’ chance Elon was lying about an attack.”
Another staffer told the outlet that the technical malfunction was not due to a DDOS attack, noting that the rest of X appeared to functioning while the livestream crashed.
The technical failure is reminiscent of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ 2023 announcement on XSpaces that he was running for president. During the announcement the feed abruptly cutting off while music played and users were unable to join the space.
Trump mocked DeSantis at the time on his Truth Social app, writing: “Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”
The campaign for Vice-President Kamala Harris wasted no time in mocking Trump’s flop.
The campaign took to Trump’s very own Truth Social site to throw these words back at Trump, by reposting his truth.
The campaign later released an official response to Trump’s conversation with Musk, referring to them as “self-obsessed rich guys.”
“Donald Trump’s extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature not a glitch of his campaign, which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight during whatever that was on X.com,” campaign spokesperson Joseph Costello said in a statement.
“Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.”
