Last night, Twitter owner Elon Musk hosted a Spaces live audio conversation with former 2024 US presidential candidate Donald Trump. It didn’t go well.
The call was supposed to start at 8pm ET but went down quickly, preventing many from joining the space. Those who were able to join were met with lo-fi techno playing from Trump’s account until about 45 minutes later, when the conversation began in earnest.
But the most notable aspect of this whole fiasco was the fact that Musk posted to X that “it appears there was a massive DDOS attack” — in other words, he was suggesting that someone was maliciously trying to disrupt normal traffic to the web-based service.
It appears that ๐ is experiencing a large scale DDOS attack and we are working to shut it down.
In the worst case scenario, we will reduce the number of live listeners and post the conversation at a later date.
โ Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
And when Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus suggested, without any evidence, that the outage was an act by Democrats “fighting to ‘save’ our democracy from two giant obstructionists”: [Musk and Trump]Musk simply replied, “Yes.”
Yeah
โ Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
People were quick to scoff at these claims, since every other aspect of X seemed to function normally during this so-called “massive DDOS attack.” Additionally, The Verge reported that one X source said there was no DDOS attack, while another said Musk was “99 percent” lying.
It’s worth noting that X had similar technical issues with Spaces last year when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was launching his now-ended presidential campaign (Musk blamed it on an overloaded server at the time), not to mention the string of technical issues that occurred on the platform after Musk’s acquisition and subsequent mass layoffs of the company’s engineers.
“Therefore, there is no reason to believe that Musk’s phone call with Trump was not due to a server overload or other ordinary technical issue. Of course, Musk’s dishonesty is well-documented at this point, so the possibility that he lied about this latest incident isn’t all that surprising. But his attempt to politicize the outage by blaming it on a political party opposed to a candidate he publicly supports is particularly troubling.”
Image credit: Shutterstock
Source: The Verge
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