• Elon Musk says the platforms attempt to host a live streamed event via Spaces with Donal Trump failed as result of a “massive DDOS attack”.
• This is not the first time that any live streams have not gone as planned on the platform.
• Employees at X have reportedly refuted the claim made by Musk.

In the early hours of this morning, 2:00 AM to be precise, Elon Musk prepared to interview Republican Presidential hopeful Donald Trump on X, via the Spaces platform that the company first launched under its Twitter guise back in early 2021.

The interview, however, which was supposed to be live streamed to hundreds of thousands of users on the platform, did not go as expected. This as it did not actually happen, or rather failed to launch.

Per TechCrunch, those wanting to tune in were greeted by an error message that read, “This Space is not available”. This forced Musk to delay the interview by 30 minutes, as well as share a recording with followers after the live streamed event wrapped up.

It was not a good look for X, which Musk has designs for making an everything app, but the Chief Twit took to the social media platform to make some bold claims regarding the technical failure. More specifically he claimed that a DDoS (Distributed-Denial-of-Service) attack was to blame.

“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on ????. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” he posted this morning. “We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today,” he added.

As Engadget posits, Musk was unable to share precisely how a DDoS attack, which would cripple an entire platform, only impacted a very specific feature within X. Not only that, he did not account for how it was only this one Spaces live streamed event that was affected by the DDoS attack.

“All of our data lines, like basically hundreds of gigabits of data, were saturated…We think we’ve overcome most of that,” he explained while thousands of listeners waited to tune into the interview.

While it is unclear whether the claims being made by Musk are indeed true, some X employees are reportedly refuting the claims. Going unnamed for obvious reasons, workers at X told The Verge that what Musk was stating regarding a DDoS attack are simply not true.

“The rest of X appears to be working normally, however, and a source at the company confirmed to The Verge that there wasn’t actually a denial-of-service attack. Another X staffer said there was a ’99 percent’ chance Elon was lying about an attack,” the publication wrote.

Regardless of what the issue plaguing this morning’s botched interview attempt on X’s Spaces is, it is not a good look for Musk or the platform. This is not the first time that X has fumbled a live stream, with a Presidential run announcement by Ron DeSantis last year also failing to come to fruition.

Musk noted at the time that Twitter’s (as it was known then) servers were, “kind of melting”. It’s unknown if the same issue is what happened with this morning’s attempt, but it looks like the scale of a Spaces event is something that X will need to address.

Either way, the desire to be an everything app still needs some work.

[Image – Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash]