XHe may be the richest man in the world, but, as his glitch-prone conversations with Donald Trump demonstrate, Elon Musk still can’t seem to get over the X’s technical issues.
Musk’s interview with the presidential candidate was delayed for 40 minutes as the platform struggled with technical issues.
This isn’t the first time the X has had a high-profile glitch.
In May 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis attempted to launch his own campaign for the White House on X with Musk.
But, like his ultimately doomed campaign, questions dogged the interview from the start. Gremlins meant Mr. DeSantis had to sit back and wait before delivering his speech.
This seems to be a cautionary tale that Musk is heeding – the day before his interview with Trump, he said he would conduct “system expansion testing” on “Spaces” (the name of the X audio chat feature).
But even with such preparation, he could not solve the technical problems that ensued. According to Reuters, at one point, about 1.3 million people were listening.
XWithin minutes, the word “crash” became a trending topic on X, with users posting about the high-profile glitch.
Of course, some took the opportunity to target Mr. Musk. Others said the interview generated so much interest that it “brought the Internet to its knees.”
However, Musk pointed his finger at something else: cyberattacks.
“X appears to have suffered a large-scale DDoS attack,” Musk posted.
A Distributed Denial of Service attack, or DDoS, is an attempt to overload a website, making it difficult to use or access.
The BBC cannot independently verify whether such a cyberattack occurred, but Technology blog The Verge said that X’s sources told it that no such attack existed.
Meanwhile, experts are divided.
Matthew Prince, head of security firm Cloudflare, told the BBC: “This is most likely a DDoS attack.”
He said “it’s impossible for us to know” because X doesn’t use Cloudflare to protect its Spaces system, but said his company did contact Mr. Musk to offer help.
Meanwhile, Netblocks director Alp Toker said the social media platform’s explanation of how to solve the problem “is not particularly consistent” with DDoS attacks.
“Given Elon Musk’s claim that
“Limiting the number of legitimate users is not a common mitigation measure for DDoS attacks, nor is it usually helpful… so Mr. Musk’s own statements suggest that the platform may have been struggling with overall snooping capabilities.”
Cyber intelligence company Cisco Thousand Eyes also said there was a lack of evidence of a cyber attack.
“While we cannot definitively state the root cause of this incident, Cisco Thousand Eyes did not observe traffic conditions typically seen during DDoS attacks, such as network congestion, packet loss, and increased latency,” it said.
Not enough engineers
There’s another, more prosaic explanation for what happened: deep wound Company employees incited by Mr. Musk.
“Historically, when a large number of users enter the X realm, Spaces will be collapsed,” said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity consultant at cybersecurity company ESET.
“This could also lead to an escalation as Musk fired a large number of employees after taking control of the platform.”
His thoughts were echoed by Rashik Parmar, head of chartered IT agency BCS, who said that “firing 80%” of a company’s engineers would always have a “significant impact” even in the case of a cyberattack.
“Engineers are at the forefront of defending against these cyber threats,” he said.
“Without adequate staffing, social media platforms’ ability to protect their networks and users from DDoS attacks will be severely compromised.”
However, whether it’s a malicious third party or one’s own flaws, the end result is the same.
The purpose of an interview is to showcase the capabilities of a platform that, we’re told, will one day become An “everything app” It finally showed that its old technical limitations weren’t going away.
