Trump Returns to Twitter/X Just In Time To Chat Up Elon Musk

Washington Post:

Donald Trump’s much anticipated conversation on the social media platform X with owner Elon Musk was marred by technical errors Monday evening, starting more than 40 minutes late as more than a million users tuned in to the event. It was the latest mishap for the Republican nominee as he has sought to regain his footing amid a surge in Democratic enthusiasm for his new rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

The joint appearance was also a high-profile embarrassment for Musk’s X, which has faced numerous outages since the entrepreneur’s takeover and suffered from a server meltdown during a presidential campaign launch last year.

Musk billed the conversation with Trump as “unscripted with no limits on subject matter.” But during much of the discussion, he focused on comfortable topics for Trump, such as undocumented immigration. He also allowed the former president to deliver his preferred talking points and a stream of false statements, giving the chat some of the hallmarks of Trump’s signature campaign rallies.

The friendly conversation came after Trump reacted combatively to challenging questions at the National Association of Black Journalists convention — and as the GOP nominee is also attacking Harris for not doing interviews since she announced her campaign for president. Trump reiterated that criticism of Harris on the X Space and repeated his frequent claim that Harris’s rise to the top of the Democratic ticket amounted to a “coup.”

Musk opened the Spaces apologizing for the delay, saying that “we unfortunately had a massive distributed denial of service” attack on the site that “saturated all our data lines.” He did not immediately provide evidence for his claim. “As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” he said.

Some engineers said it didn’t make sense that the rest of X was functioning well while users struggled to access the stream. Distributed denial of service attacks often look like an excess of regular traffic. With millions of people expected to listen in, ordinary traffic would have been high, and one way to prepare, adding bandwidth capacity, would also absorb most DDoS attacks.

An X adviser in a position to know said he saw no evidence of an attack, but cautioned that he could not immediately rule out a stealthier offensive and noted that Musk would be privy to additional information on any attack. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal company matters.