Joe McConnell
XHe may be the richest man in the world, but – as his often technically problematic conversation with Donald Trump demonstrated – Elon Musk still can’t seem to get over X’s technical problems.
Mr Musk’s interview with the presidential candidate was delayed by 40 minutes due to technical problems encountered by the platform.
This wasn’t X’s first major malfunction.
In May 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis attempted to launch his White House bid on X with Mr. Musk.
But, like his ultimately doomed campaign, problems plagued the interview from the start. Gremlins meant Mr. DeSantis had to sit and wait before he could even make his speech.
Musk appeared to be heeding a warning: The day before his interview with Trump, he said he would run “system scaling tests” on “Spaces,” the name of X’s audio chat feature.
But despite this preparation, he failed to handle the technical problems that followed, as, according to Reuters, at one point about 1.3 million people listened to the conference.
XWithin minutes, the word “collapsed” began trending on X, as users posted about the high-profile incident.
Some (of course) took the opportunity to take aim at Mr. Musk. Others smeared the interview as if it was so interesting that it “brought the Internet down.”
But Musk pointed the finger at something entirely different: a cyberattack.
“Looks like there’s 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, making it difficult to use or otherwise inaccessible.
The BBC cannot independently verify whether or not such a cyber attack occurred, but Tech blog The Verge says its sources at X told it there was no such attack.
Meanwhile, experts are divided.
“It could be a DDoS attack,” Matthew Prince, 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 added that his company had reached out to Mr Musk to offer assistance.
Meanwhile, Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, said that the social media platform’s explanation of how the issue was resolved was “not particularly consistent” with a DDoS attack.
“Since Elon Musk said that X had to limit the number of live listeners to mitigate the issue, we can infer that the outage was related to the number of live listeners,” Toker said.
“Limiting the number of legitimate users is not a normal mitigation measure for DDoS attacks and would not typically help… so Musk’s own statement suggests that the platform may have been struggling with its overall listening capacity.”
Network intelligence firm Cisco ThousandEyes also said there was a lack of evidence to suggest a cyberattack.
“While we cannot definitively determine the underlying cause of the event, Cisco ThousandEyes did not observe traffic conditions typically present during a DDoS attack, such as network congestion, packet loss, and high latency,” he said.
There are not enough engineers
There is another, more prosaic, explanation for what happened: the deep cuts to the company’s workforce, at the instigation of Mr. Musk.
“Spaces has historically shut down when a large number of users have entered this area of X,” said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at cybersecurity firm ESET.
“The situation could also be made worse by the fact that Musk laid off a large portion of the employees when he took control of the platform.”
His thoughts were echoed by Rashik Parmar, director of BCS, the authorized institute for computer science, who said that even if it had been a cyber attack, “laying off 80 percent” of the company’s engineers would still have had “a significant impact.”
“Engineers are on the front lines of defense against these cyber threats,” he said.
“Without adequate staffing, social media platforms’ ability to protect their networks and users from DDoS attacks is severely compromised.”
However, whether it is a malicious action by a third party or internal shortcomings, the end result is pretty much the same.
An interview that was supposed to showcase the capabilities of a platform that, we are told, will one day become an “all-purpose” app has ended up proving that its old technical limitations have not disappeared.
