Social media users were dismayed after the highly anticipated sit-down between X boss Elon Musk and ex-president Donald Trump was derailed at the outset by technical issues by around 40 minutes.
The two were supposed to begin chatting at 8 pm Monday on Spaces, as part of the site formally known as Twitter. Numerous users reported errors or said they could not get into the start conversation, which eventually got underway at 8.40 pm.
“Lmfao all of Spaces entirely broken,” one user posted. “Disastrous showing for Musk and frankly over the top second hand embarrassment for Trump.”
“Elon is screwing trump with his crap spaces,” posted another. “Spaces never works when it matters.”“I am having issues connecting to the X Spaces with Trump and Elon Musk,” wrote a third. “I guess I am not the only one. The #WarRoom on #Rumble is also having issues.”
The difficulties suffered by Musk and Trump echoed a similarly glitchy attempt by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to announce his now-scrapped presidential candidacy.
Shortly before the interview was set to get underway, Trump posted on X, “This is the biggest interview in history, and now, we’re asking YOU to make this President Trump’s BIGGEST FUNDRAISING DAY EVER! Before the interview is over, we’re calling on TEN MILLION Patriots to donate ANY AMOUNT and proudly say, I STAND WITH TRUMP!”
In May 2023, DeSantis agreed to publicly launch his campaign with a webcast on X, the first 30 minutes of which treated listeners to an audio pastiche of feedback, garbled speech and dropped connections. The audience dropped from an estimated 600,000 at the beginning, to 40,000 listeners, eventually making its way back up to around 100,000 people in total.
The Twitter app repeatedly crashed for users who tuned in for the announcement. Tech investor David Sacks, who was roped in to introduce the event, reportedly remarked that “the servers are melting.”
In that case, Musk blamed the issues on X’s servers. In an apparent attempt to ensure the setup didn’t buckle similarly on Monday night, Musk earlier in the day posted on X, “Am going to do some system scaling tests tonight & tomorrow in advance of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump.”
On Monday, around 8:16 p.m. easten, the webcast between Trump and Musk had still not started. A few minutes later, Musk posted a message blaming the technical failure on what he said “appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”
Musk then floated another explanation for the Spaces blackout, claiming, “We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.”
He posted again at 8:27 p.m., promising, “We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter.”