Last night, X (Twitter) owner Elon Musk hosted a Spaces live audio conversation with former 2024 U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump. It didn’t go over well.
While the call was supposed to begin at 8pm ET, it crashed immediately, preventing many people from joining the Space. Those who were able to get in were met with lo-fi techno playing from Trump’s account until about 45 minutes later, when the conversation properly began.
But the most notable aspect of the whole debacle is the fact that Musk posted that there “appears to be a massive DDOS attack” on X. In other words, he was suggesting someone made a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic to the web-based service.
There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down.
Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
And when Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus suggested, without any evidence, that the outage was the work of the Democratic Party “fighting to ‘save’ Democracy from two massive disrupters [Musk and Trump],” Musk simply replied, “Yeah.”
Yeah
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
Immediately, people scoffed at these assertions, given that all other aspects of X seemed to be working properly amid this supposedly “massive DDOS attack.” What’s more, The Verge reported that one source at X said there was no DDOS attack, while another said there was a “99 percent” that Musk was lying.
It should be noted that X had similar technical difficulties last year with Spaces when Florida governor Ron DeSantis launched his since-ended presidential campaign. (At the time, Musk attributed that to overloaded servers.) That’s to say nothing of the slew of technical issues on the platform following Musk’s takeover and subsequent mass layoffs of company engineers.
Therefore, there’s no reason to believe the Musk-Trump call wasn’t a case of overloaded servers or another normal technical issue. Of course, Musk’s dishonesty is well-documented at this point, so it’s not exactly surprising that he is likely lying about this latest incident. However, it’s especially problematic when he’s trying to politicize an outage by pinning it on the party running against the candidate he’s publicly endorsed.
Image credit: Shutterstock
Source: The Verge
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