Elon Musk alleges DDOS attack ahead of his 'conversation' with Donald Trump on X

Elon Musk

Ahead of his much-talked about Twitter Spaces chat with former US president Donald Trump, Elon Musk alleged that his social media platform X was attacked. In a series of tweets, Musk made the allegations. “There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down,” he said in a post on the social media platform. He followed it up by giving assurance that the conversation will be posted. “Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”

Musk said that the platform was expecting a lot of traffic for the conversation and had done extensive testing. “We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today,” he further said in another post. He updated the users and said “We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter.”

Earlier, Musk had clarified that he wasn’t interviewing Trump but rather having a “conversation”. “My use of the word conversation is deliberate.This is so that people understand how @realDonaldTrump  talks when it’s a conversation, rather than an interview.  Nobody is quite themselves in an interview, so it’s hard to understand what they’re really like,” Musk said.

A DDoS attack is a cyberattack aimed at disrupting a website or online service. It works by flooding the target with overwhelming amounts of internet traffic from multiple sources, often controlled by a botnet. This surge of traffic overloads the system, preventing legitimate users from accessing it. Essentially, it's like crashing a website by bombarding it with too many visitors at once, making it inaccessible to everyone else.