The highly anticipated interview of former US President Donald Trump by Elon Musk on the social media platform X, which Musk owns, was delayed due to technical issues. Musk posted on X 18 minutes after the scheduled start time of 8 p.m. US Eastern Time (5.30 AM IST) that there appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. He added that they are working on shutting it down and that, in the worst-case scenario, they will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.
"We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today," he added. "We will proceed with a smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter."
What is a DDoS attack?
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.
How does a DDoS attack work?
DDoS attacks are carried out with networks of Internet-connected machines. These networks consist of computers and other devices, such as IoT devices, that have been infected with malware, allowing them to be controlled remotely by an attacker. These individual devices are referred to as bots (or zombies), and a group of bots is called a botnet.
Once a botnet has been established, the attacker is able to direct an attack by sending remote instructions to each bot. When a victim's server or network is targeted by the botnet, each bot sends requests to the target's IP address, potentially causing the server or network to become overwhelmed, resulting in a denial-of-service to normal traffic. Because each bot is a legitimate Internet device, separating the attack traffic from normal traffic can be difficult.
Donald Trump X ban
Former President Donald Trump was permanently suspended from X in January 2021, when the social media platform was known as Twitter. However, after Musk purchased the platform, he lifted the ban, and Trump returned in August 2023. Trump has posted just one message since his return but remains active on Truth Social, the social media platform he launched after being banned from X/Twitter.
Trump picked up more than 300,000 new followers after his return, taking his total to 88.3 million followers on X, which is 80.8 million more than the 7.5 million he has on Truth Social. According to Musk, X has 600 million monthly active users (other estimates put it at 540 million), giving Trump a much larger platform.
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