XHe may be the richest man in the world, but – as his glitch-prone conversation with Donald Trump showed – it seems Elon Musk still can’t overcome X’s technical problems.
Mr Musk’s interview with the presidential hopeful was delayed by 40 minutes while the platform struggled with tech issues.
It was not X’s first high-profile malfunction.
In May 2023, Florida governor Ron DeSantis attempted to launch his own bid for the White House on X with Mr Musk.
But, much like his ultimately doomed campaign, problems plagued the interview from the outset. Gremlins meant Mr DeSantis had to sit and wait before he could even give his speech.
It seemed to be a cautionary tale that Mr Musk was heeding – the day before his interview with Mr Trump he said he would be performing “system scaling tests” on “Spaces” – the name for X’s audio chat feature.
But even with that preparation, he was unable to deal with the tech problems that followed, as according to Reuters, around 1.3 million people listened in at one point.
XWithin minutes, the word “crashed” was trending on X, as users posted about the high-profile failure.
Some (of course) took the opportunity to take aim at Mr Musk. Others spun the interview as having been of such great interest that it had “crashed the internet”.
Mr Musk pointed the finger at something else entirely though: a cyber attack.
“There appears to be a massive DDoS attack on X,” Musk posted.
A distributed denial of service attack – or DDoS for short – is an attempt to overload a website, which makes it hard to use or otherwise inaccessible..
The BBC cannot independently verify whether such a cyber attack occurred or not, but tech blog The Verge says its sources at X told it there was no such attack.
Meanwhile, experts are split.
“It very well could be a DDoS attack,” Matthew Prince, the head of security firm Cloudflare, told the BBC.
He said it was “impossible for us to know” because X does not use Cloudflare to secure its Spaces system, but he said his firm did reach out to Mr Musk to offer assistance.
Meanwhile Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, said the social media platform’s explanation of how the issue was fixed “isn’t particularly consistent” with a DDoS attack.
“Given Elon Musk’s claim that X had to limit the number of live listeners to mitigate the issue, we can infer that the outage correlated to the number of live listeners,” said Mr Toker.
“Limiting the number of legitimate users isn’t an ordinary mitigation for DDoS attacks and wouldn’t usually help… so Mr Musk’s own statement suggests that the platform might have been struggling with overall listener capacity.”
The network intelligence company, Cisco ThousandEyes, also said there was a lack of evidence pointing to a cyber attack.
“While we cannot definitively state the underlying cause of the event, Cisco ThousandEyes did not observe traffic conditions typically present during a DDoS attack, such as network congestion, packet loss, and elevated latency,” it said.
Not enough engineers
There is another, more prosaic, explanation for what happened: the deep cuts to the company’s workforce that Mr Musk instigated.
“Spaces has historically folded when large number of users have entered this area of X”, said Jake Moore, Global Cybersecurity Advisor at cyber security firm ESET.
“This also may have been escalated due to the fact Musk laid off large swathes of employees when he took control of the platform.”
His thoughts were echoed by Rashik Parmar, head of BCS, the chartered institute for IT, who said even if it was a cyber attack, “firing 80%” of the firm’s engineers was always going to have “a significant impact”.
“Engineers are at the forefront of defending against these cyber threats,” he said.
“Without adequate staffing, the ability of social media platforms to protect their networks and users from DDoS attacks is severely compromised.”
Whether down to a malicious third party or its own shortcomings, however, the end result is much the same.
An interview that was meant to show off the capabilities of a platform that, we are told, will one day become an “everything app” ended up showing its old technical limitations have not gone away.
