Elon Musk recently revealed that an attack on X caused a delay of 42 minutes in his interview with former President Donald Trump. Musk attributed the delay to a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack that overwhelmed X's servers with bogus traffic. Despite acknowledging some mistakes made by X's staff, Musk commended the team for fending off the attacks and rectifying errors.
This incident brought back memories of a previous technical glitch during an interview with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on X, which led to audio disruptions and a delayed start. Former President Trump had criticized the technical difficulties faced by DeSantis during that interview.
Following the acquisition of X by Musk and subsequent layoffs, the platform experienced various glitches and outages. Musk, who now oversees the technical aspects of X, assured that the system had been stress-tested to handle up to 8 million concurrent streams.
DDOS attacks, commonly launched by massive botnets, aim to overwhelm servers with traffic. Companies often employ third-party services to identify and block fake traffic to mitigate such attacks. Musk hinted at parting ways with a cybersecurity company following a recent tech outage but did not confirm if their service could have prevented the attack on X.
Despite the challenges, the interview with Trump eventually commenced, with X reporting 73 million 'views' of the audio stream. Musk deemed the interview a success, emphasizing the resilience of X's platform amidst the technical difficulties faced.
