Anika Begay
Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s X Spaces joint event appears to have stalled on Monday afternoon. The conversation between the X owner and the former president was scheduled for 5 p.m. PT, but users received an error message when they joined at that time.
“This space is not available,” a message on X said when trying to join the space.
The highly anticipated conversation, hosted by Trump and Musk, was supposed to mark the former US president’s return to X. The Spaces event, which Musk called a “conversation,” kicked off at 5:42 p.m. PT. The live event was scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. PT.
Trump returned to the social media site Monday morning, where he posted for the first time since January 2021, when he was banned from the platform. Some of Trump’s posts on Monday promoted conversations with Musk, while others featured campaign ads and links to the former president’s website. Over the past three years, Trump has shifted to posting primarily on his own social media platform, Truth Social. That said, Trump was allowed to post on X for nearly two years; shortly after Musk took over Twitter, now X, he reinstated Trump’s Twitter account in November 2022.
Musk said that “a massive DDOS attack on X” appeared to have occurred, presumably the cause of the X Space crash. The owner of X says the social media platform conducted extensive testing earlier in the day with 8 million concurrent listeners. Musk kicked off the Space interview by linking the alleged DDOS attack, which stands for distributed denial-of-service, in which an attacker overwhelms an Internet server with a wave of artificial traffic, to opposition to listening to the former president.
“As this massive attack demonstrates, there is a lot of resistance to people simply listening to what President Trump has to say, but I am honored to be having this conversation,” Musk said at the start of Spaces.
This isn’t the first time X Space has crashed when a political campaign tries to use the platform. In May 2023, Twitter glitches interrupted Ron DeSantis’ 2024 campaign announcement during a Twitter Space session with Elon Musk and venture capitalist David Sacks.
