DDOS Attack: Elon Musk Claims This Is What Derailed Donald Trump Interview. Details
X CEO Elon Musk said that a 'massive' DDOS attack has affected the social media platform ahead of interview with Donald Trump.
Republican candidate Donald Trump's much-awaited interview with Elon Musk on X was derailed after the billionaire entrepreneur said that the social media platform was hit by a massive cyber attack.
Musk said that there appears to be a "massive" Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) attack on X and added that work is underway to shut it down.
"There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down," said the X CEO on the social media platform.
There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.
"Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later," he added.
Providing an alternative, Musk said that the interview will be done with a smaller number of concurrent listeners and the "unedited" audio will be posted immediately thereafter.
"Crashed", "unable" and "#TwitterBlackout" started to trend within minutes of the event's scheduled 8 pm EST start time. A pop-up stating "this space is not available" with a monkey emoji appeared on the desktops as users attepmted to attend the "Spaces" event.
Outage tracker Downdetector reported a surge in the reports of the social media platform being inaccessible to users ahead of the interview but it could not be verified immediately whether it was because of a malicious attack.
The rest of X operations appeared normal, ad X users questioned whether it was a DDOS attack or if the Spaces event was just overcrowded with people trying to tune in.
The X CEO had been promoting the event earlier in the day, calling it a conversation rather than interview, saying: tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.”
The interview began at 8:42 pm EST and around 1.3 million people had joined the Spaces event, one hour into the interview.
What Is A DDOS Attack?
A distributed denial-of-service attack is a malicious activity in which the attacker targets a server, service, or network with overwhelmed internet traffic to prevent users from accessing connected online services and sites.
In a DDOS attack, an attacker floods a site or a server with errant traffic which results in poor functionality of the website or knocking it offline altogether.
During a DDOS attack, a website or a service is flooded with HTTP requests and traffic by a series of bots, or botnets. A computer under attack is stormed by multiple computers pushing out legitimate users which can lead to delay of services other otherwise disrupt it for a length of time.
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