The virtual meeting between Elon Musk and Donald Trump on X Spaces appeared to have collapsed on Monday afternoon. The conversation between the owner of X and the former president was scheduled for 5 p.m. Pacific Time, but users encountered an error message when trying to join at that time.
“This space is not available,” read the message on X when attempting to access the space. The much-anticipated conversation, promoted by both Trump and Musk, was expected to mark the former U.S. president’s return to X. The event’s broadcast, which Musk had termed a “conversation,” finally began at 5:42 p.m. PT, although it was originally set to start at 5 p.m. PT.
Trump returned to the social network on Monday morning, making his first post since January 2021, when he was suspended from the platform. Some of Trump’s posts on Monday highlighted the conversation with Musk, while others included campaign ads and links to the former president’s website. Over the past three years, Trump has mainly used his own social media platform, Truth Social, to share his messages. It’s worth noting that Trump has had the ability to post on X for nearly two years, as his account was restored in November 2022, shortly after Musk took control of Twitter, now known as X.
Musk claimed that the event’s interruption was apparently due to a “massive DDoS attack on X,” which supposedly caused the X Space to crash. According to the owner of X, the platform conducted extensive tests earlier that day with 8 million simultaneous listeners. At the start of the Space interview, Musk suggested that the alleged DDoS attack (a distributed denial of service attack where a malicious actor floods an internet server with artificial traffic) might be linked to opposition to hearing the former president.
“As this massive attack illustrates, there is significant opposition to people simply hearing what President Trump has to say, but I am honored to have this conversation,” Musk stated at the beginning of the Space.
This is not the first instance of an X Space crashing when a political campaign attempts to use the platform. In May 2023, technical issues on Twitter interrupted the announcement of Ron DeSantis’s 2024 campaign during a Twitter Space session with Elon Musk and venture capitalist David Sacks.
By: Nestor Castillo, ForAllTechNews Director