Musk blames DDoS attack for X outage but it’s likely self-inflicted

Elon Musk’s conversation with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was delayed as several X users claimed they were unable to join the X Spaces interview. In the aftermath of the outage, Musk blamed the attack on his platform on a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).

Ahead of the interview on August 13, the charismatic founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and owner of the X platform said that his team would either fix the issue or have a smaller number of live listeners on Spaces.

Musk implicates DDoS attack for disrupted interview 

Spaces were introduced on Twitter (now X) to facilitate real-time conversations. Elon Musk chose the feature to have an interactive session with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on August 13. Ahead of the conversation, several users on X claimed they could not join the discussion.

Following this, X owner Elon Musk cited a technical glitch as the reason. In a post on X, Musk blamed the delay of his interview on disrupted service caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on the platform.

Musk supporters with Republican leanings seem to be convinced that the “disruptive” interview was interrupted by Democrats. Elon Musk has since posted that he would be “happy to host” Kamala Harris on X Spaces.

During the two-hour interview, Donald Trump also criticized Democratic opponent Kamala Harris and current President Joe Biden.  

DDoS attack claim divides opinions

X users who disagree with Musk’s DDoS attack claims have been quick to point out that an attack of that nature usually brings down an entire service or website instead of a specific feature or part of a service. In this case, the Spaces interview with Trump was the only service reportedly disrupted. 

Some users also claimed that the new X infrastructure was unable to handle a high-traffic event. They believe the disruption was more likely due to an internal technical failure. In one such post, one X user claimed, “there is no DDOS attack, elon musk just has downgraded the entire twitter infrastructure to run on a single paperclip community note requested”.

In a DDoS attack, a server or service is overwhelmed due to high internet traffic. The increased traffic delays response to legitimate requests. Therefore, technical analysts on X believe that such an attack would have likely affected multiple areas of the microblogging website due to its shared resources.

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, he has rebranded the website to X, modified algorithms, overhauled the user interface, and changed content moderation policies.

As of now, we await more data and commentary to understand the true cause of the disruption.