Monday’s sit-down between X boss Elon Musk and ex-president Donald Trump was derailed at the outset by technical issues, echoing a similarly glitchy attempt by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to announce his now-scrapped presidential candidacy.
The two were supposed to begin chatting at 8 pm on Spaces, as part of the site formally known as Twitter.
However when the conversation was supposed to start, numerous users reported errors or said they could not get into the conversation.
“Lmfao all of Spaces entirely broken,” one user posted. “Disastrous showing for Musk and frankly over the top second hand embarrassment for Trump.”
“Elon is screwing trump with his crap spaces,” posted another. “Spaces never works when it matters.”“I am having issues connecting to the X Spaces with Trump and Elon Musk,” wrote a third. “I guess I am not the only one. The #WarRoom on #Rumble is also having issues.”
In May 2023, DeSantis agreed to publicly launch his campaign with a webcast on X, the first 30 minutes of which treated listeners to an audio pastiche of feedback, garbled speech, and dropped connections. The audience dropped from an estimated 600,000 at the beginning, to 40,000 listeners, eventually making its way back up to around 100,000 people in total.
In that case, Musk blamed the issues on X’s servers. In an apparent attempt to ensure the setup doesn’t buckle similarly on Monday night, Musk earlier in the day posted on X, “Am going to do some system scaling tests tonight & tomorrow in advance of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump.”
At 8:16 p.m. local time, the webcast had still not started. A few minutes later, Musk posted a message blaming the technical failure on what he said “appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”
Musk then floated another explanation for the Spaces blackout, claiming, “We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.”
He posted again at 8:27 p.m., promising, “We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter.”
This is a developing story