Trump’s Gig with Musk is Another X Catastrophe

Elon Musk promised entertainment but delivered technical difficulties instead. Musk planned to host Donald Trump for a live interview on X (formerly Twitter Spaces) at 8 p.m.

Musk's precautionary measures prior to the Trump interview couldn’t save the platform from crashing. I Screenshot: Donald J. Trump X

However, for the second time in the 2024 campaign, the social media platform was glitchy, and many users couldn’t listen to the interview, Brittany Gibson reported for Politico.

Musk posted that “there appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down,” adding that he might proceed with the interview with a smaller set of listeners. DDOS stands for “distributed denial of service.”

The interview started about 45 minutes late. The issues echoed Musk’s previous X Live event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who launched his Republican presidential primary campaign on an X live interview with Musk.

As with Trump’s event, the site’s livestream portal, which is audio-only, crashed. “I’m assuming all the Trump supporters who ridiculed DeSantis for the crashing of his Twitter Space with Musk will do the same here. LOLOLOLOL,” wrote conservative commentator Erick Erickson, with a clown face emoji.

Musk had posted ahead of the event with Trump that he was “going to do some system scaling tests tonight & tomorrow in advance.”

However, these precautionary measures couldn’t save the platform from crashing. Nor did they prevent Trump from making controversial statements, leading critics to question his mental fitness.