A much-anticipated online conversation between the world’s richest man and a candidate for the presidency of the United States of America had its start time disrupted for nearly an hour by a cyberattack.
That’s according to owner of X, previously Twitter, Elon Musk. Hosting the chat with 45th president Donald Trump on his social platform’s Spaces tool, the billionaire put the embarrassing delay down to a “massive DDOS attack”.
The conversation would ultimately last for more than two hours, with Musk and Trump discussing topics ranging from the latter’s presidency race with Vice President Kamala Harris, last month’s failed assassination attempt, striking workers, and illegal immigration.
Musk/Trump Conversation Tribulation
Musk had previously said that the event’s billing as a ‘conversation’ had been a deliberate choice of word, so that “people understand how [Trump] talks when it’s a conversation, rather than an interview”.
But anybody tuning in at the scheduled start time of 8pm ET on Monday were treated to 47 minutes of easy-listening muzak and an additional seven minutes of silence before Musk eventually introduced the chat.
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In that period, Musk posted on X that the issues had been caused by a massive DDOS attack on the platform – a claim he reiterated at the beginning of the conversation – and that his team were working on shutting down the problem.
There 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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
He also said that they had “tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners” earlier in the day.
A few hours after the conclusion of the exchange, a post from X on the platform said that the Space had received 73 million views and that “there were 4 million posts about Elon Musk and President Trump’s conversation on X, generating a total of 998 million views”.
“Combined views of the conversation with [Donald Trump] and subsequent discussion by other accounts now ~1 billion” – Elon Musk on X
What is a DDOS Attack?
A DDoS – or distributed denial-of-service – attack is a malicious online attempt to massively inflate the amount of traffic going to a server or network and, thus, overwhelm it to the point where it can’t function properly.
The targeted site or infrastructure becomes so saturated with requests that it effectively renders it unusable. To put it another way, the server crashes.
Unlike cyberattacks such as ransomware or data breaches, the bad actor doesn’t necessarily aim to financially gain from the threat (although, in some cases, they can be used to blackmail the victim).
The end goal is more usually intended to disrupt the target. In this case, it seems safe to assume that the humiliation of Musk and Trump was probably the main reason for the DDoD attack.
It isn’t the first (and won’t be the last) time that a major organization has been the target of DDoS attacks. ChatGPT owner OpenAI was attacked at the end of last year, while Microsoft and Google halted the “largest” cyberattack on record in October. Even the UK’s Royal family aren’t immune – its website , “royal.uk,” went down after an apparent DDOS attack.
