Donald Trump and Elon Musk's interview on X gets delayed due to cyber-attack; Know more

Recently, entrepreneur Elon Musk and presidential candidate Donald Trump had a high-profile interview on X, however, the interview got marred due to technical glitch.

By Marita Pinto

Published on Aug 13, 2024 | 05:59 PM IST | 65.5K

Image Courtesy: Getty Images

Billionaire and social media tycoon Elon Musk had a friendly chat with Republican nominee for president in 2024, Donald Trump, on Monday. The live audio broadcast was plagued by technical problems from the beginning and had some interruptions in between.

Elon Musk confirmed the problem and blamed a denial-of-service attack for it. Additionally, Musk stated that 8 million concurrent viewers had already tried to access the live stream.

The chosen venue for the conversation was Spaces, X's livestreaming audio feature, but it wasn't functioning properly. The website became unworkable and froze when someone clicked on the link to the broadcast, which was hosted by Trump's inactive @RealDonaldTrump account. Some Twitter users claimed their browsers had crashed and they were unable to dial in.

Musk stated he would work through the technical issues to start the interview 30 minutes later than scheduled, which was originally set to begin at 8 p.m. Eastern US time. In the interim, the problems appeared to be resolved, and users were able to join the broadcast by clicking the link.

At 8:30 ET, X's hold music eventually ceased, and Trump's microphone began to rustle. After that, the broadcast was silent for ten more minutes. Musk and the former president were both muted. Shortly after, the interview began, and at one point, X showed more than one million listeners at once.

Malicious attempts to interfere with or suspend an online service's servers in order to render its services inaccessible are known as distributed denial-of-service attacks.

DDoS is a type of hacking attack that seeks to disrupt a targeted server, service, or network's normal operations by flooding it with internet traffic, according to cybersecurity company Norton. The server or network crashes or slows down significantly when it is overloaded with requests and is unable to process new ones.

DDoS attacks, according to a Microsoft support page, "target websites and servers by disrupting network services in an attempt to exhaust an application's resources."

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