Critics railed against the technical difficulties that plagued X owner Elon Musk’s highly-anticipated interview with former President Trump.
X users rushed to join Trump’s “Space” where he was supposed to speak with the billionaire tech tycoon on the 2024 race. However, the “Space” immediately crashed due to the influx of users, offering the message “This Space is unavailable.”
Moments later, Musk took to X, telling users, “There appears to be a massive DDOS [distributed denial-of-service] 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.”
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In response to one X user who speculated that Democrats were involved in technical meltdown, Musk wrote “Yeah.”
Musk later insisted X was technically prepared for the Trump interview, posting “We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.”
“We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter,” Musk followed.
The interview officially went underway after roughly 40 minutes. At least 1 million X users joined the beginning of the relaunched conversation.
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Critics reacted to the viral controversy.
“Please let Elon know we can’t join,” billionaire investor Bill Ackman told Trump.
“Trump was fuming at the NABJ when their technical difficulties kept him waiting for 30 minutes Now he’s kept waiting again, and ofc a lot of the coverage is going to focus on the technical meltdown no matter what he says. He won’t be happy,” Breaking Points co-host Saagar Enjeti wrote.
New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan took a swipe at Musk’s earlier promise when he said “Entertainment guaranteed!”, replying “I’ll take functionality guaranteed!”
The social media meltdown similarly occurred last year during the presidential campaign launch of Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who also had an interview set with Musk on his platform (then Twitter) but had technical malfunctions due to high “Spaces” traffic.
The interview was supposed to mark Trump’s grand return to the platform after the company banned him in 2021 after the January 6 riot. Shortly after Musk bought Twitter and changed the company’s name to X, he reinstated Trump’s account.
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