X’s live streaming infrastructure appears to have failed again at a pivotal moment for the company: X owner Elon Musk was scheduled to interview Donald Trump. On live Spaces launched on Monday at 8 p.m. ET, but the stream was repeatedly interrupted and many users were unable to access it at all.
musk claimed The failure was reportedly caused by a “massive DDOS”. [distributed denial of service] “Attack on X,” the company said, adding that it had “tested its system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.” Instead, only a “small number” of people will be able to listen to the conversation live. As of 8:30 p.m. ET, the live stream had not yet begun. “Crashed,” “Unable to,” and “Twitter Blackout” were trending on the platform.
Those who were able to join the stream were greeted with about 30 minutes of hold music and several minutes of complete silence. The live stream finally began at 8:40 p.m. ET. “All of our data lines were basically saturated with, like, hundreds of gigabits of data,” Musk said. “We think we’ve gotten through most of it.” Musk did not explain how the DDOS attack could target only one specific feature of the service without affecting other aspects of the X app or website.
This isn’t the first time a high-profile livestream from space has run into technical difficulties. Last year, Ron DeSantis attempted to announce his short-lived presidential bid while chatting live with Musk on X, but that stream was also delayed by repeated crashes. At the time, Musk said Twitter’s servers were “kind of melting down.” A Musk biographer later reported that the problem was caused by months of instability within Twitter’s systems after Musk ordered his cousins to hastily decommission one of the company’s data centers.
