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.

Donald Trump's interview with Elon Musk was derailed after a cyber attack on X.

Source : PTI

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.

Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024

"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.