The elevator music played for over 54 minutes, then went completely silent.
That’s what happened to X users trying to tune in to an interview between Elon Musk and Donald Trump on Monday night, when the company’s live audio platform, Spaces, experienced glitches when hundreds of thousands of user accounts tried to tune in.
Musk blamed the problem on a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, but some X employees claim that’s not true.
The tweet may have been deleted
X Space Failure
Musk’s interview with former President Donald Trump was heavily promoted in advance by both men.
Musk publicly endorsed Trump in his presidential reelection campaign this summer. Trump has struggled in the polls since President Joe Biden decided not to run for reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination. To promote the interview, Trump returned to Musk’s pre-SpaceChat X, posting prolifically to the platform for the first time in nearly a year.
President Trump’s X account shared the Space chat about 15 minutes before it was scheduled to start at 8pm ET. Both President Trump and Musk were in the Space, but more than 54 minutes passed after the scheduled start time before the two began speaking.
Meanwhile, X users were reporting issues with not even being able to enter X’s space. Mashable confirmed that there were hundreds of thousands of users in the space around 8:30 p.m. When Mashable tried to enter the space, they were suddenly greeted with a screen that read, “This space is unavailable.” Other X users reported a similar experience, unable to enter and hear the space. Users who were lucky enough to get inside also heard elevator-like waiting music, which eventually went completely silent.
The tweet may have been deleted
When X’s technical issues were finally resolved, Musk blamed the glitches on a “massive DDoS attack.”
“Apparently there was a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏,” Musk posted. “We are working on shutting it down. In the worst case scenario, we will reduce the number of live listeners to allow the conversation to proceed and post later.”
Mashable Lightspeed
But aside from the glitches in Trump and Musk’s space, the rest of X appeared to be operating normally at the time. Adding further doubt to Musk’s DDoS claims, some X employees told The Verge that what Musk said about the attack was simply not true.
“A company source confirmed to The Verge that there was in fact no denial-of-service attack,” the tech outlet reported. “Another Xtreme staffer said there was a ’99 percent’ chance that Musk was lying about the attack.”
X also ran into technical issues last year when Musk tried to host a Spaces stream with then-presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. The platform, then known as Twitter, similarly crashed when hundreds of thousands of users tried to enter Spaces.
Musk’s fake numbers and Twitter blunders
The Space Chat begins at the 54-minute mark, and the two engage in a typical right-wing political debate, touching on many of the topics Musk posts on social media and Trump addresses in his speeches.
Trump credited Musk for the technical issues, citing inaccurate statistics, which he attributed to “breaking all records” for viewership. Later in the interview, Trump appeared to look at the number of views for his shared Spaces post, which at the time had about 60 million views. X’s post views are an impression-like feature that tracks each instance a post appears in front of a user, whether they actively clicked on it or it just appeared in their feed while they were scrolling.
The live audio space with Trump and Musk itself peaked with approximately 1.4 million concurrent viewers.
But Musk gives credence to Trump’s inaccurate ratings reference.
The tweet may have been deleted
“The combined views of my conversation with @realDonaldTrump and subsequent discussions with other accounts are currently at roughly 1 billion,” Musk said on X, calculating the total number of views, or impressions, of all posts on SpaceChat.
At press time, Trump and Musk’s X-Space had roughly 24 million views, which includes live viewers and replays, but the post itself claims 183 million views or impressions.
Interestingly, when talking about the platform he bought and renamed X, Musk repeatedly referred to it as “Twitter” during his conversation with Trump, and referred to “posts” as “tweets,” which is no longer the official name.
Meanwhile, Trump’s @realDonaldTrump account pinned the space to the top of his X profile. Trump’s account hasn’t posted to X since.
As of Tuesday, Trump was back on his social media platform, TruthSocial, where he shared a link to his conversation with Musk, but did not share a link to X. Instead, he directed TruthSocial users to recordings of the conversation on YouTube and the right-wing video platform Rumble.