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The audio livestream of a conversation between Elon Musk and the former president ran late as users scrambled to try to access the site.
- Aug. 12, 2024, 8:26 p.m. ET
Elon Musk’s live conversation on Monday on X with former president Donald J. Trump got off to a glitchy start, a setback for the social media service as Mr. Musk pushes the company to regain its dominance as an online epicenter of political discourse.
Some users who tried to listen to the conversation, which was hosted on the company’s audio livestreaming feature called Spaces, were greeted by silence and an error message that read: “Details not available.” Users said they had trouble accessing the livestream on desktop computers and mobile phones. Those who were able to get the livestream to work were met with hold music.
The Spaces was originally scheduled to start at 8 p.m. Eastern, but was running late as the number of tens of thousands of attendees went up and down.
Mr. Musk blamed a cyberattack known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, for the glitches. DDoS attacks work by flooding servers with malicious traffic and knocking them offline.
“Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” Musk wrote. The attack could not immediately be verified.
Mr. Musk spent Sunday evening testing the service to make sure it could stay up and running by streaming himself playing a video game.
