He 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.
Within 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”. But there was another twist coming.
In a surprising move, X’s owner began insisting that the problems were not his fault – instead, X had been targeted by 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.
“Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” he said.
When the event finally began, 40 minutes after its scheduled start time, Mr Musk continued the cyber attack claims, saying it showed there was opposition in the US to hearing what Mr Trump had to say.
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.”
DDoS attack or not, though, the end result is the same – despite his ambitions to build an “everything app”, Elon Musk’s X carries on looking like being an unreliable platform for the kind eye-catching content it wants to be home to.
